Beat boxing has obviously been the lazy man’s best friend, for using your ‘voice as an instrument’ has its own perks like freedom from carrying bulky drumkits and mighty consoles meant for turn table effects.

Beat boxing has essentially become a synergy of mouth, lips, tongue, and voice to produce impeccably realistic music for the ears, that is hard to differentiate from the real sound of music of the desired instruments.

For India, beat boxing has brought alongwith it, immense possibilities of explorations in the most frugal sense. The young and passionate musicians of India, may not afford to buy the costly musical gears, but can afford to live their dreams with a little effort- hitting YouTube tutorials and learning on the go from there. And with the likes of Vineet Vincent and Voctronica, the craze for this new age alternate music is actually turning itself to a revolution.

Much like the self trained dancers of the YouTube generation, beat boxing is largely a bye product of the power of internet. But, it started largely through underground experiments and exercises into foraying in the alternative. In the 1990s the solo beat boxers from London were signing albums with big labels at a really tender age of their career. Then Make the Music 2000, made beat boxing mainstream. It was largely the techniques used in the album that resulted in an unprecedented growth in interest for the medium. It featured voice scratchings and packed in a lot of surprises like a bonus track after 60 seconds of silence.

It was however, largely an off the grid experiment, that was standing against the waves of the popular music of the times. But then, artists like Justin Timberlake or even more creative persons like Bjork used beat boxing straight up as the core for her music. Beat boxing was slowly getting into a vogue by then.

TV music channels were harping in newer and bolder experiments in the field of beat boxing. This meant that layered studio beat boxing and more polished and professional sounding tracks were making it to the world wide market. In the year of 2001 was released the very first beatboxing compilation DVD, the raw album had a very basic nomenclature of just Beatboxing Vol.1. In the very next year Beatboxer Entertainment was formed, aiming at focusing purely on the propagation of the new art form.

From there on, it propelled real fast as beatboxing got featured in the opening ceremony of the Olympics in 2004. Suddenly the craze and euphoria surrounding beat boxing bombarded throughout the world. Kids got so excited that they held amateur jam sessions to figure out their talents in the field. The alleys and the ghettos where once the rap artists would thrive, now became the lab house to a completely new kind of music. But, these however were largely scattered and often got los in random smoked up afternoon discussions.

With the advent of the internet and the democratization of the video making and distribution the indie music scene erupted and now the entire world got curious of this new trade. People started searching for more exciting videos on the internet and contributed towards generating even more creative projects. The community of the go getters gave rise to the amazing work scape of beat boxers through which, even to this day, newer and more innovative beat boxers are evolving. Today websites like humanbeatbox.com by Tye Tye are dedicated towards creation of tutorials for the emerging beat boxers. Many celebrated YouTube channels have dedicated playlists of hundreds of tutorials on different styles and flavors.

In the West the Beat boxing convention is the order of the day, in our country college students are largely eyeing at national beat boxing championships. From what had been largely an underground movement of experiments and explorations has curiously today grown up into one of the sought after facilities of college students. After Vineeth (the college kid from Bangalore) who attempted the world record for the largest human beat boxing with over 2000 people. The students of Bangalore and others around got largely intrigued by the awesome new trade to stardom, and today the internet is flooded with beat boxing videos by students across different colleges of the country.

It’s amazing to see, how much one can achieve by just “raising his voice”!