i feel like as my first tumblr post i should put it out there that mahiro will be like the next BIG beatbox looper !! one of my top three fr (the other two being rusy and bizkit (my goat on god))
Miles wants to impress Gwen by learning to drum. One problem, he doesn’t have access to a drum kit or anyone who knows how to play the drums (that’s not Gwen) so he goes for the next best thing and learns how to beatbox. He actually becomes Fairly Proficient, enough to catch the attention of his school’s a cappella group (pretend that’s a thing the school has) that needs a new beatboxer since their old one graduated and bribes him with extra credit. He does show the Spider-Gang and they are all varying degrees of impressed.
Dr. Adriano Lameira, Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Warwick said, "Humans use the lips, tongue, and jaw to make the unvoiced sounds of consonants, while activating the vocal folds in the larynx with exhaled air to make the voiced, open sounds of vowels."
Orangutans are also capable of producing both types of sounds—and both at once.
And:
According to the authors, the vocal control and coordination abilities of wild great apes have been underestimated compared to the focus on the vocal abilities of birds.
"Producing two sounds, exactly how birds produce song, resembles spoken language but bird anatomy has no similarity to our own so it is difficult to make links between birdsong, and
spoken human language," continued Dr. Hardus.
The new research has implications for the vocal capabilities of our shared ancestors and for the evolution of human speech—as well as human beatboxing. Dr. Lameira said, "Now that we know this vocal ability is part of the great ape repertoire, we can't ignore the evolutionary links.
"It could be possible that early human language resembled something that sounded more like beatboxing, before evolution organized language into the consonant—vowel structure that we know today."
Why this excites me: For most of my nearly 60 years on this planet, I've had to listen to the pop science narrative that "What Makes us Human" can be summarized as a quantifiable list of physical and cognitive Abilities.
It might not be intentional on the part of those who write those scripts, but the subtext to that narrative is always that if your checklist of Uniquely Human Abilities is incomplete, then your humanity is incomplete.
But in the last couple of decades, we've been discovering more and more items on that list are not unique to humans, after all. So maybe what makes us human can't be quantified on a checklist. And even with an incomplete list, we can still be completely human.