#beatbox analysis

Tomorrow, by Doobsama

In live beatbox tournaments before the head to head battles, often there are these things called elimination rounds, where a bunch of beatboxers do brief (traditionally 90 second) performances that are then ranked by the judges. Depending on the event, either the top 8 or top 16 enter, and then tournament brackets are created by pitting the 1st ranking elimination against the 8th (or 16th), the 2nd against the 7th (or 15th), and so on and so forth. 

The 2024 USA Beatbox Championships was a top 16 battle, and this performance by Doobsama was ranked 8th, putting him up against Kingdom in 9th. Regardless of the ranking, this was one of the standout moments of the night. Doob constructs these incredible arpeggios using various vocal techniques that are both technically impressive and pleasing to the ear. On top of that, he structures his music in a way to make a coherent piece that never feels stale. Tomorrow is such an ear-worm and I personally keep coming back to watch it every now and then and it still hasn’t gotten old.

Shadows By My Stride, by Venoa

Some events don't have the bandwidth to have open eliminations where anyone can walk in on the day of an event and attempt to make it into the top 8 or 16. In cases like these, the chance to do an elimination is only given to certain people who are qualified through various means. The most common way to qualify, however, is the wildcard video. Anyone can submit a video by a certain deadline before the actual in-person event as long as it follows the rules, and then a set of judges rank them. The best submissions are allowed to actually do an elimination round during the event. This is useful because it guarantees that certain people have a chance to perform and it gives them time to prepare for the event when they learn they qualify (or change plans if they learn they don’t). This was Venoa’s wildcard entry to the 2025 West Coast Beatbox Championships and it ranked 3rd out of 46 video entries, earning him a spot in the competition.

Venoa has a deceptively delicate style for how aggressive his performances can be. He has hard hitting mid-low end sounds, and his fast drum patterns sound explosive on any sound system. His lyrics have a certain braggadocio (“Bitch I’m on top 2nd place by a long shot”) that add to that aggressive energy (sometimes hip hop is just like that, Venoa’s actually the opposite of an arrogant person so I don’t want people to have any misconceptions that he is). And yet when he wants you to hear his intricate details, you hear them. His impressively high frequency whistles that accompany some of his kicks without being painfully piercing. His amazing open hi hat stutter that I personally can’t get enough of. It’s definitely more drum heavy and less melodic than Doobsama but it's not any less representative of beatboxing.

9 to 5 Biz, by Xepher

What I want to highlight is specifically Xepher’s second round from 3:35 to 5:15, but feel free to watch the whole thing if you’d like. 

Because the US is such a large country, for some events where many people have to travel, beatboxers will book a large Airbnb to stay for the weekend of the event. This brought about the tradition of the bnb 9v9, a small battle for fun that runs parallel to the main event. Two team captains are picked, and each draft beatboxers to join their team. The captains then send out their team members to face each other in 9 head to head battles. The team with the most wins (or judge votes) wins overall, but there’s nothing real at stake and less pressure since it’s just for fun. People generally give their best performances when not inhibited by their nerves, so some 9v9 battles can be more fun to watch than the main event! This video was from the bnb battle for the 2022 American Beatbox Championships. 

I love listening to Xepher because he knows how to keep his music fresh. He’ll construct a tone/texture that’s nice to listen to and then creates variation upon variation with that texture to keep it interesting (see the part where he says “switch it up” and someone in the crowd says “oh my goodness!”). In that “switch it up” section, he uses a sound called “fart bass” (yeah haha funny name not the point). While fart bass as a sound is not unique to Xepher, the way he stutters and rolls it on top of pitching it is super original and creative. He also has this energy as a performer that’s sometimes cheeky and sometimes bombastic, which makes it generally entertaining to watch him as a battler.

Clean Slate, by Catching Moths

Online beatbox battles have been a thing for a long time (and I can elaborate in a later post) but during and after the pandemic, a new format of battle emerged where two competitors would asynchronously post their rounds against each other. This brought about new opportunities to play with visuals and cinematic techniques to add to the entertainment, the ability to pick the perfect take instead of having to perform perfectly with only one chance, and in some competitions it meant being allowed to actually master rounds to fully capture the frequencies a competitor wants to highlight in their music. This was Catching Moths’s round against French Beatboxer TRC in the semi finals of the 2025 Beatbox Paradise Championships, one such asynchronous online battle.

What can I even say about this song? With a funky but earnest melody over a steady beat, Catching Moths tells a beautiful story with frankly gorgeous lyrics. I’m not the most poetic person, so I’m really not doing it justice. The level of artistry and genuine self expression in the piece brings out something in me that makes me want to cry despite being a cis male whose ingrained instinct is to never shed a single tear. On a more technical note, she pitches her unique “elephant sound” and uses other lip oscillations to create harmonies and layered textures that all add to her melody and song structure. It can be deceptively easy to fall into the trap of doing too much in an attempt to show off but she doesn't by playing with space and tasteful simplicity!

Wing - Attention

Wing has been getting a lot of attention (heh) lately due to a combination of his music videos, short form content, and recent performance at the 2025 Grand Beatbox Battle (basically the world championships). Despite his more recent success, he’s been in the community for a long time notably winning the South Korean Championship in 2017 and Asian Championship in 2018. This video, a cover of Charlie Puth’s Attention, was his submission to the 2018 Grand Beatbox Battle (GBB). Unfortunately it ranked just below the cutoff, and he was unable to compete that year.

While this performance excels in many aspects, I want to highlight two things. First is his clarity/cleanliness. Wing has always been one of the cleanest in the game, and this earlier example of his beatboxing shows that it’s something he’s never lacked. Each sound is concise; there’s no extra air or indication that he’s straining himself to reach a frequency or a pitch. Each sound is also consistent; if it wasn’t caught on video one could imagine they were generated by pressing buttons on a drum machine. Clarity, along with power and speed are great indicators of a beatboxer’s level of control over their beatboxing. While Wing certainly doesn’t lack in power or speed, his sheer cleanliness makes him one of the best in the game.

The second thing I want to highlight about this performance is its structure. While musical structure can be more subjective and varied depending on what ideas the musician wants to convey, there’s still a way to do it. I’m not versed in music theory nor am I a professional songwriter so forgive me if I sound amateurish here, but Wing does at least construct a piece with solid structure. He starts by introducing Attention’s melody in the form of humming with a basic/quiet beat. He then picks up in energy with a simple drum buildup while singing the lyrics, transitioning with a quick filter effect into a bassy and groovy drop. He keeps it fresh by having plenty of variations of different sounds and drum patterns, then moves onto a second drum buildup that removes the melody. His second drop is less melody heavy but introduces new drum textures and as a bonus he throws in his signature w-w-wing sound. In the end, he starts to close out with the opening humming beat but fakes it out by reiterating the first drop, and then does a true ending with the humming he started with. In summary, he follows a basic beatbox track structure- intro, buildup, drop, second buildup, second drop, then conclusion, but explaining how he does it so masterfully in more detail would ramp up the word count and I’ve got things to do so I’ll leave it at that.

Osis - Cash

Osis is an Irish/Latvian beatboxer. An absolute powerhouse of a beatboxer, Osis won the 2022 Online World Beatbox Championship, and scored second at the Grand Beatbox Battle 2024. Cash was his video submission to the 2024 Grand Beatbox Battle, scoring first place amongst the video submissions and earning him a spot in the battle (where he went on to get second as I previously mentioned).

If Wing makes his beatboxing look easy, Osis is the exact opposite. If you compare their visuals across the two videos, Wing looks like he’s vibing and Osis looks like he’s in physical pain. But don’t mistake this as me putting down Osis; while Wing gets aura from his effortless groove, Osis’s performance is impressive from him being locked the fuck in. How? His use of dynamics, specifically power. While Cash has audio mastering, it can’t hide the sheer loudness behind Osis’s sounds. His kicks sound like explosions and his snares sound sharper than an axe splitting logs. The vocal effect he puts on his first “money in cash” is a sound called vibration bass, a sound that’s notorious in the community for being inconsistent and quiet (for example, Wing has noted several times that he’s sometimes unhappy with how his comes out). Yet Osis pushes it to balance its volume out with his drums. He goes all in on loudness to show his audience that he's all in about beatboxing.

Cash isn’t necessarily the best example of sheer power in beatboxing (see the person who beat Osis in the finals of GBB24, Julard), but it’s a great example of power with the second category I want to highlight- texture variety. To create the sub bass frequencies, instead of relying on one sound he uses five. He has two vocal basses (vibration & inward bass), one created by the lips (liproll), one created by the tongue (sub clickroll), and then one which is one of his signature sounds which I kid you not is a lip oscillation (buzzing your lips) layered with polyphonic singing (singing 2 notes at the same time) layered with a whistle. Beatboxers are freaks. For higher pitched frequencies, he has his polyphonic singing and his aforementioned signature sound. He also uses a variety of different drums and poppy sound effects with different textures to keep things fresh. In a way, the variety he shows in his frequencies is its own form of complexity- but I’ll get to that some other day.

Zer0 - 2021 Kickback Wildcard

If you ask a beatboxer who in the community has the best drums of all time, there’s several names that come up. Alem, the 2015 world champion. Colaps, the 2021 GBB champion. But there’s one name that gets thrown in the conversation despite how few live events he’s attended. That would be Zer0, from Azerbaijan. While his location and finances made it difficult for him to battle on the big stage, he rampaged the online scene throughout the 2010s and throughout the pandemic years. Notable achievements include winning the 2020 online (read: pandemic) edition of GBB, and winning way too many online battles to count. He’s currently a full time surgeon, so he’s not as active in the scene anymore but the occasions when he pops back in are always something to behold. This video was his submission to an online battle called the Kickback Beatbox Battle in 2021, which didn’t actually make it in for reasons I forget.

One of the main reasons that Zer0 is one of the contenders for greatest drums of all time in the beatbox scene is his speed. He creates unique fills that compress an impressive amount of sounds into brief phrases. Throughout the video there are plenty of parts where he leaves space between his beats to not overcomplicate things and even still, he will add throwaway flourishes that show off how fast he can go even in a low energy, casual beat. When he picks up the pace and energy, he goes even faster (see the portion from 1:00-1:20). Whether it's playing with further subdivisions of notes (16th notes, 32nd notes) or just increasing bpm, Zer0 can do it all.

The second category I want to highlight in this track is dynamics again. While for Osis I highlighted the aspect of loudness and power, I want to show off another aspect of dynamics- control. In the section starting from the 1:20 mark of the video, Zer0 does a beat with his mouth entirely closed, creating a filter effect that mimics hearing loud music muffled behind a wall, as if you were in the bathroom at a party. Let me be honest here. That’s cool as fuck, and the beat goes unreasonably hard. While Cash turns up the volume as high as possible to show off how powerful Osis is as a beatboxer, Zer0 plays with the dial, choosing to turn the volume down at a key point to create an amazing moment in his piece.

Bizkit - Don’t Speak

I love my local/national community too much to just not include an American as an example of Good Beatboxing™. And what is a more relevant example of an American Good Beatboxer™ than the current US Champ? Throughout 2025, Bizkit saw a string of victories, from getting 2nd at Vokal Total, a high level European battle, to 1st at the New York Championships, and then 1st at the USA Championships. Unfortunately since the 2025 USA Championships happened in December, the videos haven’t been released yet and I have to use his 2024 performance (in which he got second place). The part I will focus on is his second round from his top 16 battle against Brody, another American beatboxer (5:03-6:33).

Bizkit excels at a lot, and I wish I could break down everything I like about this song or his style in general but I have to get this out before midnight EST or my other Friday effort poster friends will make fun of me. Since this video is a live performance unlike the others I want to highlight his stage presence. First, his little “wow look, they know my lyrics” quip is a response to his opponent bragging “watch how they know my lyrics” in the previous round. Second, as a dancer (yes he’s also a dancer), he’s completely in tune with moving his body along to the beat, moving his arms to emphasize his lyrics, bouncing his body real low when he brings the beat low at 5:27, and doing a little sassy walk at 5:49 during his second buildup. He also engages the crowd, making clapping motions when he wants the crowd to clap along, and having them sing along to his lyrics as mentioned before. I was there to see it live and the "hey" chant was electrifying.

I also want to point out his control over pitch. The entire song follows the blues scale in D (Music theory nerds please clown me if I say something wack or wrong here, I need to be punished for my hubris), and if you listen real close, you’ll notice that every single one of his non drum sounds stays on the scale and/or follows the melody he introduces in the beginning. This allows him to keep the audience engaged by hooking them on a familiar melody throughout the piece while introducing new textures with every new sound. Yes he has good structure, yes he has great variety in textures/frequencies, but part of the reason he’s able to maintain his structure with his varied frequencies is how he keeps hammering the main melody home no matter how many times he changes up everything else. 

This essay is an extension of my dissatisfaction with the 5 traditional judging categories. Similar to my breakdown of what makes a beatboxer objectively good, I want to further break down what makes people unique in beatboxing. I’m going to argue that originality in beatboxing is a function of proficiency, preference, and ingenuity (and let me further explain what I mean by this). Let me roughly define proficiency as mastery over sounds and patterns in terms of execution- timing, dynamics, clarity, and pitch if applicable. This is mainly in terms of quality, but not exclusive to quantity (knowing many techniques can be helpful). I’m using the word ingenuity in the sense of the ability to create new sounds or patterns. Preference is what drives the choices behind a beatboxer’s performance. What genre of music should their song invoke? Where should they put this pattern? Does a sound feel like it naturally fits into their performance? In that sense, proficiency, preference, and ingenuity all come from experience. You cannot become proficient without practice. You cannot have a preference without experiencing something and determining that you like or dislike it. You cannot have ingenuity without either accident (experience creating art) or inspiration (experience consuming art).

I’ll first discuss proficiency and its relationship to originality. Sometimes, your average beatboxer will be able to do the same sounds and patterns as a world champion beatboxer. What separates them is the level of execution- at a higher level there will be more control over volume, clarity, speed etc. Beyond mastery of using sounds together, some beatboxers have achieved unrivaled mastery over a single sound. Often, they will have variations of sounds that they pioneer/popularize named after them (D-low’s inward bass, Codfish’s liproll, Slizzer bass, etc). While oftentimes the sounds are not invented by these people, the textures they create with their variation of the sound often will be unique. I’ll put an example below.

King Inertia is well known in the community for his Inward Bass (a sound that is achieved by breathing inwards while vibrating the vocal folds). This creates a growly texture, but when refined to a high enough level, can create room shaking sub-bass frequencies. Just watch him perform and at 1:50 in the video the camera literally shakes from how deep his inward bass goes. People can copy his style. Some people have a similar reliance on inward bass and use the same drums as him. But it’s hard to copy the richness of the texture, and the few people who have mastered inward bass at as high of a level have their own variations they specialize in.

Preference also naturally drives an artist’s stylistic choices. This can be in multiple ways, but I’ll start with genre. To carry on the example from above, KI (King Inertia) often uses inward bass to add to his melodies, and he often takes inspiration from hip-hop and trap music in his beats. I briefly mentioned above that there were a few others who have a high level inward bass, and one of the other big names is Vocodah. Vocodah and KI, both being from the US, have trained together and battled against each other many times. Vocodah, however, sounds unique in a completely different way from KI. He often layers inward bass with other sounds, whether it be gasping, whistles and laser sounds, or some form of tongue rolling. Vocodah is much more influenced by EDM music, especially genres like brostep and riddim. Such genres are heavy on grittier and darker textures. I'll put another example of genre influences in style below, but this time it'll be a different example than Vocodah.

Patbox is a French Ivorian beatboxer who’s been gaining some recent traction, winning several battles and getting 2nd at the 2025 French Beatbox Championship. It doesn’t sound that crazy to be 2nd in a country but the French scene is so strong that his opponent in the finals was the 2025 GBB champion, Pacmax. To reiterate, GBB is the highest level battle in the world. Before I nerd out even more about titles and battles, I want to highlight his unique style. Most of his sounds are quite common in the global scene, and especially the French scene. However, Patbox uses them in refreshing ways packaged in genres that were less common in the community (at the time, he sort of helped set off a trend). Almost nobody beatboxes Afrobeats like Patbox. Personally I’m not too familiar with the family of genres so please do clown me if I get something wrong, but a good chunk of the song is Baile Funk. He’s clearly super comfortable in the genre, playing around with melodies, beat patterns, and textures to make it interesting and keep it fresh. Beyond genre, there’s usage of sound. Do you like using a given sound sparingly and impactfully or more recurring and sustained? A beatboxer might use a sound for drops while another uses that same sound in their intros and prefers other sounds for drops. These are all driven by preference.

Ingenuity is simultaneously an easy and difficult way to sound unique. It quite literally takes inventing a new sound or technique. Similar to named variations of sounds, some sounds are named after the people who invented (or at least popularized) them. Examples include the Calexy whistle, the Beat Rhino snare, the Zede scratch, and many many more. 

Dharni is the only 2x Grand Beatbox Solo Champion in history, winning 2013 and 2014 back to back. He sounds like no one else simply because no one else does the sounds he does. He’s invented a plethora of techniques that he uses in his showcase here, from his unique vocal bass/filter, to his unique water drop sound, to his echo effects. Even if someone else were to copy everything that he did, it wouldn’t change the fact that he set the precedent.

Of course I’m not going to end it at that. However, I do want to establish an important point. At the end of the day, beatboxing is a medium to create music. It’s a form of art, and that means what you find enjoyable will be subjective. In fact, many people find beatboxing in general unenjoyable to listen to. Some sounds are technically impressive but make you want to cover your ears. Sometimes an artist will choose a genre of music you personally detest. Maybe you’ll encounter an idea or concept that’s new to you and the unfamiliarity is unpleasant to hear. The amusingly unfortunate reality of the world of goofy mouth sounds is that sometimes the things that come out of your mouth will sound goofy. 

Now that I’ve established that, I’m also going to tell you not to be fooled. There also are many objective metrics used to judge beatboxing. If you’ve ever watched a video of a battle and wondered what the thought process was behind the final decision, any good judge will take these metrics into account.

The five traditional judging categories

Sometime between 2000-2015, a basic system was developed to have more standardized and fair judging metrics.[1] In any good judging system, a person should be able to defend their decisions and decision making process, and creating categories allowed judges to do so on a less arbitrary basis. In the end, five categories were made, and are still the most used in most events today (except one category which was dropped/folded into the others)[2]: Technicality - Ability to execute sounds, level of mastery of the instrument

Musicality - Ability to express varied and intentional musical ideas

Originality - Ability to showcase a unique skillset and sound

Showmanship - Ability to capture the audience, level of crowd control and connection

Flow - Ability to stay on beat and have it sound natural. Was eventually removed due to being redundant.

These categories are very useful in their own right, but once you start thinking deeper and actually analyzing beatboxing through this lens, you start running into problems. I’ll explain using an example of a time when I judged (part of) an event.

1. I’ll probably have another post on this but a lot of beatboxing history is oral so some of my retelling is literally from memory of other people telling me their accounts that can range from being firsthand to being the sixth in the game of telephone. Please don't take the words I say as absolute truth.

2. Some of my information is originally from the website Humanbeatbox.com, which is no longer online. I personally asked one of the former writers/staff of the website about what the 5th category was because I wasn’t sure and he said that if he remembered correctly it was flow. 

Problems with the traditional judging categories

To show that I stand on business, I’ll post part of my judge score sheet from the event. As you can see, I ripped the definitions straight from the sheet because I’m both lazy and think they were pretty much on the ball in defining them:

For the event, my fellow panel members and I judged each performance for the purpose of scoring and then ranking them to find the top 7 (who would proceed to battle along with one pre-qualified person). In the middle of one of the performances, one person made a timing mistake. I leaned over and asked one of the other judges to make sure it wasn’t just me. After confirming that it indeed wasn’t just me, he said something that I found a bit peculiar: “I’m gonna take off musicality points for that.”

When I asked him why, he further elaborated that to him, rhythm was a core part of music/musical expression, and therefore a mistake related to rhythm was a mistake related to musicality. I pointed out that traditionally mistakes in execution were judged as part of technicality, and that timing is a crucial part of displaying mastery of your instrument (the mouth in this case). As much as I’d like to say we continued on into a fascinating and deep conversation on the nature of music and technique, the next person went up and we were forced to move on. We just agreed to disagree.

The elements of a beatbox performance

I hope I’ve highlighted that one of the big problems with the traditional categories is that the lines between them sometimes blur. Because the traditional five/four can be broken down into more subcategories, different people will group subcategories differently. 

Thinking about these subcategories of judging, I attempted to break down a beatboxing performance into as many elemental parts as possible with a couple days of musing and some conversation with other beatboxers. I don’t think the list I made below should necessarily replace the traditional categories (adding more columns on a spreadsheet is not what most people would call fun). It’s also very possible that I’m forgetting some, that other people would pick different ones, define them differently, and group them differently. Nevertheless I thought it would be useful anyways as an alternate way to think about beatboxing. These subcategories are:

Timing: Are you able to stay on beat?

Pitch: Are you able to stay on pitch for vocals or non vocal pitched sounds?

Dynamics/Power: How do you use volume? How much control do you have over the volume of your sounds?

Clarity: How clean and precise do each of your sounds come out?

Originality: Does it sound like you’re copying someone else? Are you doing something no one else can do?

Sound/Texture Variety: How many different sounds can you show off, and what textures do you create?

Structure/Composition: How are all your ideas ordered and used to create a greater piece?

Speed: How fast can you beatbox?

Complexity: How detailed are certain aspects of your performance?

Stage Presence: How do you use your body and space to visually add to your performance?

Crowd Engagement: Does the crowd audibly/visibly respond to your performance?

Improvisation: Are you able to create interesting ideas on the spot and execute them well? How well do you react to the unexpected?

Luck: Did you get dry mouth? Did your mic break? Was there an issue with the timer? Sometimes random external things happen that impact a performance.

In a head to head battle context, you might also consider how a beatboxer addresses their opponent:

Strategy: What songs/ideas/statements can you use to convince people you're better than your opponent?

Ability to counter: Do you already know how to do your opponent’s technique? Can you recreate a similar enough sounding technique on the spot to prove it’s not that hard? Can you do what your opponent does better than them?

Stage Presence: How do you take up space while also contesting your opponent for that space?

These metrics are a lot to think about at once, and many of them are heavily related to each other. For example, speed can be a form of complexity. A well developed texture can be another form of complexity. A tasteful lack of complexity can be good for structure. Being louder or faster makes it easier for someone to get sloppy and sound less clean. 

Subjectivity still matters

Even after breaking a performance down to all of these elements, there are still issues that pop up. What if someone gives a complex/intricate performance against someone else who was not as complex but had better execution? How do you compare someone who uses unique and rich textures on a simple beat with someone who fills up less frequencies but runs circles around their opponent with drum patterns? This will differ by person, by event, and by country. There’s no right answer, and having a diverse group of judges with different experiences and tastes means each judge will bring in value with their unique perspective. After all, it is important to draw wisdom from many different places. If we take it from only one place, it becomes rigid and stale.

While I hope these different tools of analysis fosters a new way for you to appreciate the artform, at the end of the day you don't have to actively think about any of that to enjoy good beatboxing. Maybe someone’s beatboxing performance just has a catchy melody you like. Maybe one of their sounds tickles your ear the same way ASMR does. Maybe a technique sounds so fascinating it gives you an insatiable need to figure out how they did it. All of these are equally valid ways to experience beatboxing.

So what does good beatboxing sound like?

Remember 2020 and the lockdown era? I want to call back to a concept that was somewhat discussed by the news and science communicators back then, specifically superspreaders and superspreader events. Under the framework of social network epidemiology, a superspreader is (roughly) an individual who spreads an infectious disease to far more people than the average spreader. This kinda makes sense. Many people interact with roughly the same set of people every day. The same coworkers and boss, the same friend group, the same household/family, the same classmates, etc. But some people have many different interactions with many different kinds of people. If you’re not someone that’s well connected, you probably know someone that is. And if you don’t know someone that is, then you definitely know someone who knows someone else that is. Even people who aren’t social butterflies or people who don’t have many friends can be surprisingly well connected. 

What makes people particularly susceptible to receiving/catching a disease is being connected to different groups of people. If you know a lot of people, but everyone is in the same friend group, then that’s not actually that bad for the purposes of spreading disease. Let’s say you get sick, and also get your friends A and B who are in the same friend group sick. In an alternate scenario where you only got friend A sick, because they also know friend B they will likely get friend B sick anyways. A superspreader however, will receive disease from and give to groups that would otherwise never interact. Someone might only have two friends but if those two are from different friend groups, then that one person has the potential to spread a sickness from friend group A to B, infecting potentially tens of people who could spread it to ten more people each and so on. 

A superspreader event can create a perfect storm of conditions that allow its attendees to become superspreaders. Things such as having many people in confined spaces or having lots of different people come in close contact with each other can contribute to the creation of an event. Notable examples include:

- A business conference in Boston in late February 2020, where it was found that 300,000 Covid-19 cases (and about 1.6% of all US cases) could be traced back to the conference

- A doctor who contracted SARS in 2003 before traveling to a family wedding in a hotel Hong Kong, infecting at least 16 other hotel guests who then brought it to Singapore, Canada, Taiwan, and Vietnam

- Mary Mallon (Typhoid Mary), a cook in early 20th century New York City. She was thought to be an asymptomatic carrier of Typhoid fever, and through the food she served infected up to 57 people with the bacteria

Superspreader events often end up happening because of an unfortunate set of coincidences, where two people randomly making contact and spreading sickness can have spiraling consequences. Now imagine some kind of fucked up scenario where instead of leaving it to random chance, you specifically tried to maximize the chance of spreading (airborne) infectious diseases. I wonder what that would look like?

It was about time I got back to talking about beatboxing. 

If it’s not obvious, my point is that beatbox events are unfortunately amazing at being superspreader events. I think it’s self explanatory that the hobby that results in the most physical spit and breath flying out of people’s mouths would spread the flu and the cold and other respiratory diseases a lot. Coming home sick from an event is a regular occurrence, and we've dubbed the phenomenon "the beatbox flu". However, I want to dive a little deeper on specific mechanisms that I believe contribute to the superspreader nature of beatbox events and then muse on potential solutions. 

The Journey:

Beatboxing can be a niche hobby, so the number of beatboxers who like going to events in a given city can be quite small. This means that for battles, shows, festivals and such, many beatboxers come in from outside the local area. Oftentimes they come from the same region (for example MA -> NY or London -> Bristol), but people can come in from far away, sometimes even from other countries. For example, in the 2025 West Coast Beatbox Championship, only 4 out of the 12 competitors were actually from the west coast of the United States. Even in national championships, there have been instances of people from other countries competing. The 2012 American beatbox champion was Rizumik, a Portuguese citizen, and due to a strange set of circumstances the current equivalent to the Japanese champion is PACMax, who is a French man living in France.[1]

The logistics of traveling means that you’re going to be taking a car, train, airplane, or even a boat for a long period of time. And being crammed into a small enclosed space with other people for a long time will obviously increase the odds of getting others sick. For trains and plane rides with transfers through large hubs (large train terminals and/or airports) it only increases the odds of superspreading, as you might infect x number of people who then go on to cause outbreaks in x different countries. Of course, this applies on the trip back home from an event as well.

1. There has been no Japanese national beatbox championship since 2021, the closest event they have to it right now is BeatCity Japan, which is open to anyone in the world.

The Stay:

Even if an event isn’t multiple days/nights, it can be exhausting to travel multiple hours to get to an event and then immediately take off to travel a number of hours again to go home, especially in the dead of night. Event goers can book a hotel or equivalent, stay with a group in a homestay or something similar, or if they’re lucky, stay with family or a friend in the area. Being in the privacy of a hotel room can help minimize time spent with others and the chance of getting sick or spreading sickness. However, sometimes that’s not realistic in its affordability. If you book a hostel or are in a group homestay, especially for multiple nights you will be spending a decent amount of time in the vicinity of others. Staying with friends or family depends on luck of having any in the area in the first place and what their accommodations are like.

The Venue:

This is also largely luck based, and I'll make a disclaimer that event organizers can be extremely limited in what venues they have access to. Sometimes it really is just having a good relationship with a venue owner by chance. That being said, the venue can still contribute to superspreading. A smaller space will undoubtedly compress people closer together, and less ventilation can once again influence the spread. Another note, I’m not trying to put blame on the organizers, but the last event I went to was at a bar that had no soap in its bathroom. I had my own hand sanitizer so I’m not gonna blame getting sick on that specifically, but it wasn’t fun to wash my hands and realize there was no soap midway through. Another thing is loud noise at events and the sound of a crowd can mean you can’t hear someone unless they’re up close and personal.

The Event:

There are certain aspects of beatboxing culture and the conventions of battles that I think help contribute to getting people sick. First is the circle jam (or jamming in general). Beatboxers tend to be very encouraging about having everyone’s voice be heard and giving everyone a shot, and the circle jam is a way to do that. The way it goes is that a group of people start a beat, and each person has a handful of bars before they pass the beat to the next person. After a couple rotations or after enough people get tired of doing it, they finish. This means you’re gonna be inhaling the spit of at least the two people next to you, or if it’s a small enough group, the entire circle. A given night will have several circle jams occur, some for fun, and some for recording content. Sometimes they’ll just happen at a homestay group and not even at the event. The second major thing is gonna sound really disgusting, but I am proud to say the global beatbox community as a whole is moving away from this. Even still, I think it’s better if I put a trigger warning here.

TW: I’m gonna talk about some unhygienic/unsanitary stuff below

The second major aspect I want to talk about is microphone sharing. If you watch old battle videos it’s really common, and two battlers going back and forth will pass the mic similar to a rap battle. Unfortunately, unlike a rap battle, beatboxing results in a much larger amount of spit going into the mic. Beatbox microphones get wet and when they dry they get crusty. For the record, the part that gets covered in the most spit is removable and therefore washable, and beatboxers do wash their mics. But in a battle setting where people have to beatbox right after each other, there’s not any time to thoroughly wipe them. I’ve been at events where I’ve had to share mics and it really is unbelievably disgusting to taste and sometimes inhale other people’s spit. The latest US national championship (2025) had mic sharing at the event and I know at least a quarter of the top 16 got sick afterwards, and I got sick for a whole month afterwards.[2] There’s an argument about fairness of sound for beatboxers using different mics, but it’s 2026. Organizers can afford a second mic of the same brand, or allow participants to bring their own mics (and even restrict that to certain brands/models if it matters).

2. I WAS COUGHING FOR THE ENTIRE DAMN MONTH OF DECEMBER AND INTO JANUARY INCLUDING THE HOLIDAYS AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

TW over At this point I’ll be getting every vaccine I can (autism makes a better beatboxer anyways), bringing hand sanitizer everywhere, and wearing a mask whenever applicable. Feel free to make more suggestions in the comments for protecting people from getting sick. More engagement makes me happy but also the less people get sick with things the better.