*promote

Self promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued Sunday, August 11th, 2013 6:12am PDT - promote requested by original submitter Procrastinatron.

Wub wub.

As much as I love Beardyman and music as a whole, that didn't seem anything new and exciting, as he or dubFx or many others have been doing this with existing equipment for years.

I can agree with that. However, the thing that makes this so interesting for me is the idea that the human being is a fundamentally unnatural creature, and the idea that modern technology more and more allows us to be an essentially modular animal, with endless possibilities.

As we innovate, we constantly redefine what it means to be a human being - clothes are so ubiquitous and culturally deep-seated that they can almost be seen as just another layer of skin, and allow us to inhabit vastly different climates, where most other animals really only function in a single setting. The same can be said for telephones and the internet, two inventions that vastly improve our ability to communicate with each other.

And what Beardyman shows us here is an example of this modularity. The "natural" human being can only produce one tone. Through cultural innovation, we can learn to sing with two tones. Through technological innovation, we can even learn to create an entire orchestra by using the input of a single man's voice.

To me, that is pretty extraordinary.

It's cool and impressive and so on, but I'm still not sure what the point is?

He talks about being able to replicate "the sound in his head". Ok, cool. Musicians have been trying to do that for years. Electric guitarists, for instance, can spend hours/weeks/months tweaking settings on a dizzying array of gear to produce the sound they want. But ultimately, the expression of the music still comes from the guitar, from the physical manipulation and vibration of the strings.

I have no problem with Beardyman using his voice as an instrument, or even manipulating it, looping it or whatever. But surely there comes a point where the manipulation is so extreme that the "source" is lost, i.e. there is nothing about the output that is affected by the input. At which point, I have to ask, why bother with voice as an input in the first place? Why not just use a wave generator?

Actually, I think I might have answered my own question. I guess it's the fact that his voice is an easily manipulatable starting point.

That's an interesting point. In a way, it could be argued that the skill needed in order to make any given instrument produce whatever it is that you've got in your head could represent a sort of ideational friction. Beardyman has obviously spent most his life practicing with his voice, and as such, his voice has become his instrument of choice. However, as he pointed out, he eventually realized that his voicebox simply wouldn't be able to do all the things he wanted it to do, and because this was an issue of biology, there was no linear path through this particular obstacle.

So he had to get a bit lateral instead.

And really, the same goes for guitars. They started out accoustic, but then somebody decided that he wanted to do more with them; and thus the electric guitar was born.

Creative people of all stripes tend to spend their lives looking for a high-fidelity method of getting the stuff inside their heads into everybody else's heads, and Beardyman is no different in that regard.

...there's a guy off to the side pressing buttons

vocal chords are an oscillation that creates a frequency, as is a guitar string or a sax reed. hence the waveforms are similar. then just fuck with it with delays, pitch shifting, compression, phasing, and all manners of eq.