Recent articles

Graph showing the distribution of place-matching sound replacements in beatrhyming, extracted from the paper about beatrhyming.

Journal article:
Beatrhyming

Beatrhyming is the art of simultaneous performance of speech and beatboxing by a single person. This open access publication is the first in-depth scientific analysis of how an expert beatrhymer weaves beatboxing sounds into words.

An MRI image of the human vocal tract, segmented into articulators including the lips, tongue tip, tongue body, velum, and larynx.

SciComm article:
Beatboxing airstream mechanisms

Highly skilled beatboxers manipulate vocal airflow in a myriad of ways. So if you want to be a better beatboxer, you need to know how to move your air! This article was jointly written by a beatboxer and beatbox scientist to teach beatboxers about the role of airstream mechanisms in beatboxing.

An MRI image of a beatboxer producing a Kick Drum, with a yellow box denoting a region of interest over the lips.

Conference paper:
Kick Drum Kinematics

Beatboxing sounds like the Kick Drum use lip closing actions that are qualitatively similar to lip closures in speech, like for [b] and [p]. We measured how long the lips take to get up to top speed for one beatboxer's bilabial Kick Drum closures, and our results are similar to previous reports for similar speech movements.

Research and resources

Beatboxing

Beatboxing is a percussive style of vocal music that began with the birth of hip hop. Comparing beatboxing to speech helps us understand why speech uses relatively few of the possible sounds the mouth can make.

Singing

Singers need fine-tuned precision to find the right note or sound quality. Measuring how singers adapt speech sounds to music reveals more about the flexibility of the fundamental action units of speech.

Beatrhyming

Beatrhyming is the simultaneous performance of speech (singing, rapping, etc.) and beatboxing by an individual. Beatrhyming shows how speech can collaborate with other vocal behaviors.

Region of interest analysis toolbox

I developed a MatLab user interface to expedite timing analyses of real-time MRI videos like the ones collected by the USC Speech Production and Articulation kNowledge group.

Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

I use evidence-based practices in my teaching and write about the results in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.

Teaching

The Science of Singing

An articulatory and acoustic phonetics class taught through the lens of vocal (and non-vocal) music. Each unit highlights a different vocal music style: opera, heavy metal, overtone singing, and beatboxing.

Speech Technology

An introduction to speech synthesis and recognition technology and the algorithms at their core, from mass-spring systems to neural networks.

Articulatory Phonetics

An upper-division course about how the vocal tract produces sound, with an emphasis on less commonly taught articulations and vocal behaviors.

Faculty Learning Community

As a member of the Linguistics Society of America's Faculty Learning Community, I've helped build web resources and organized conference sessions about promoting justice-anchored scholarship of teaching and learning in Linguistics.