-
I'd like you all
-
to ask yourselves a question
-
which you may never have asked yourselves before:
-
What is possible with the human voice?
-
What is possible with the human voice?
-
(Beatboxing)
-
♪ Ooh baby ♪
-
♪ baby ♪
-
♪ baby ♪
-
♪ baby ♪ (Baby crying)
-
♪ baby ♪ (Baby crying)
-
♪ baby ♪ (Cat meowing)
-
(Dog barking)
-
Yeah.
-
(Applause)
-
(Sword noises)
-
It was coming straight for me. I had to. It was, yeah.
-
As you can probably well imagine,
-
I was a strange child.
-
(Laughter)
-
Because the thing is, I was constantly trying
-
to extend my repertoire of noises to be
-
the very maximum that it could be.
-
I was constantly experimenting with these noises.
-
And I'm still on that mission.
-
I'm still trying to find every noise
-
that I can possibly make.
-
And the thing is, I'm a bit older and wiser now,
-
and I know that there's some noises
-
I'll never be able to make because I'm hemmed in
-
by my physical body, and there's things it can't do.
-
And there's things that no one's voice can do.
-
For example, no one can do two notes at the same time.
-
You can do two-tone singing,
-
which monks can do, which is like...
-
(Two-tone singing)
-
But that's cheating.
-
And it hurts your throat.
-
So there's things you can't do, and these limitations
-
on the human voice have always really annoyed me,
-
because beatbox is the best way of getting
-
musical ideas out of your head and into the world,
-
but they're sketches at best,
-
which is what's annoyed me.
-
If only, if only there was a way
-
for these ideas to come out unImpeded
-
by the restrictions which my body gives it.
-
So I've been working with these guys,
-
and we've made a machine.
-
We've made a system which is basically
-
a live production machine,
-
a real-time music production machine,
-
and it enables me to, using nothing but my voice,
-
create music in real time as I hear it in my head
-
unimpeded by any physical restrictions
-
that my body might place on me.
-
And I'm going to show you what it can do.
-
And before I start making noises with it,
-
and using it to manipulate my voice,
-
I want to reiterate that everything that you're about to hear
-
is being made by my voice.
-
This system has --
-
thank you, beautiful assistant --
-
this system has no sounds in it itself
-
until I start putting sounds in it,
-
so there's no prerecorded samples of any kind.
-
So once this thing really gets going,
-
and it really starts to mangle the audio I'm putting into it,
-
it becomes not obvious that it is the human voice,
-
but it is, so I'm going to take you through it bit by bit
-
and start nice and simple.
-
So the polyphony problem: I've only got one voice.
-
How do I get around the problem
-
of really wanting to have as many different voices
-
going on at the same time.
-
The simplest way to do it something like this.
-
(Beatboxing)
-
By dancing. It's like this.
-
(Music)
-
Thanks.
-
(Applause)
-
So that's probably the easiest way.
-
But if you want to do something a little bit more immediate,
-
something that you can't achieve with live looping,
-
there's other ways to layer your voice up.
-
There's things like pitch-shifting,
-
which are awesome,
-
and I'm going to show you now what that sounds like.
-
So I'm going to start another beat for you, like this.
-
(Beatboxing)
-
There's always got to be a bit of a dance at the start,
-
because it's just fun, so
-
you can clap along if you want.
-
You don't have to. It's fine. Check it out.
-
I'm going to lay down a bass sound now.
-
(Music)
-
And now, a rockabilly guitar.
-
Which is nice. But what if I want to make, say, a -- (Applause) --
-
Thanks. What if I want to make, say, a rock organ?
-
Is that possible? Yes, it is,
-
by recording myself like this.
-
(Organ sound)
-
And now I have that, I have that recorded.
-
Assign it to a keyboard.
-
(Music)
-
So that's cool.
-
(Applause)
-
But what if I wanted to sound like the whole of Pink Floyd?
-
Impossible, you say. No.
-
It is possible, and you can do it very simply
-
using this machine. It's really fantastic. Check it out.
-
(Music)
-
So every noise you can hear there is my voice.
-
I didn't just trigger something which sounds like that.
-
There's no samples. There's no synthesizers.
-
That is literally all my voice being manipulated,
-
and when you get to that point, you have to ask, don't you,
-
what's the point?
-
Why do this? (Laughter)
-
Because it's cheaper than hiring the whole of Pink Floyd,
-
I suppose, is the easy answer.
-
But in actual fact, I haven't made this machine
-
so that I can emulate things that already exist.
-
I've made this so that I can make
-
any noise that I can imagine.
-
So with your permission, I'm going to do
-
some things that are in my mind,
-
and I hope you enjoy them,
-
because they're rather unusual,
-
especially when you're doing things which are
-
as unusual as this, it can be hard to believe
-
that it is all my voice, you see.
-
(Voice effects)
-
(Music)
-
Like this.
-
(Music)
-
So, loosely defined,
-
that is what's possible with the human voice.
-
Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen.
-
(Applause)