How do language and music work together in your mind? One way to address this question is by studying how people adapt their language to musical contexts, like changing talking into singing. People do musical language in all kinds of ways, but only some of them have been studied scientifically. This research is the very first to give a scientific description of “beatrhyming,” a type of musical speech where a person beatboxes and sings simultaneously (Fukuda et al., 2022; Blaylock et al., 2023).

Beatboxers use their mouths to imitate percussion sounds. They use their lips for Kick Drums (sometimes abbreviated as {B}), the tip of the tongue for Hi-Hats ({t}), and the back of the tongue for Snares ({K}). Beatboxers usually produce these sounds very differently from how they produce speech sounds, and beatboxing music is more closely related to the drum beats of hip hop than to the sounds of words or sentences in speech.

Beatrhymers are beatboxers who learn to exaggerate speech sounds into beatboxing sounds. Our analysis shows that beatrhymers are careful to match beatboxing sounds to speech sounds based on the part of the mouth they use: speech sounds made with the lips like [p] and [b] might become Kick Drums but never become Hi-Hats, and speech sounds made with back of the tongue like [k] and [g] become Snares but never Kick Drums. For example, the word “boot” can be beatrhymed as “{B}oo{t}” but never “{t}oo{B}”.

From this research, we’ve learned that beatboxers can tap into their unconscious knowledge of how speech sounds are made to decide what kind of beatboxing sound would be most appropriate to use when beatrhyming, even though beatboxing and speech appear to be unrelated behaviors otherwise.