Human Beat Boxer, 16-year-old Raj Verma can produce sounds like that of drums, rhythm or electronic music using his lips, tongue and throat When you hear the music it is indeed hard to make out that a human is producing various sounds from mouth and without using any musical instruments. That is human beat boxing. It is an art of producing sounds like that of drums, rhythm or electronic music using mouth, lips, tongue and voice. The collective process of beat boxing is sound imitation, singing and more. Beat boxing is related to hip hop genre and it first started in the 1980’s and has evolved since. A trained beat boxer can produce sounds like kick drums, reverse kick drums, snare drums, inward snare drums, Hi-hats, cymbals, rolls, scratching and bass Sounds. Hyderabad’s prodigal kid Raj Verma, who is just 16 years old, has already made a name for himself in the art of beat boxing and is creating ripples in the world of music here. He recently shared the stage with Shrikanth Sriram populary known as Shri and Bollywood fame Indian classical singer Gayatri Iyer-Ganjawala for an eclectic performance. The audience was awe struck with his performance in electro funky beat boxing style. “The collaboration with Shri was fantastic and he is a brilliant musician anybody would love to collaborate with,” Raj says. Raj has just completed his Inter first year from St.Mary’s Junior College (Yusufguda). He also participated in a human beat boxing competition conducted by the British Council in collaboration with Sony music in January this year. Participants came from all over India. There he met with other beat boxers and they formed a band—Voctronica. The band has eight members, five of them are beat boxers and three are vocalists. Raj is the only Hyderabadi in the band, while six are from Mumbai and one hails from Bengaluru. The band meets in Mumbai for gigs and is looking forward to make more music in future. “It is a very unique band in its own way. Other bands have instruments to create music but we create music by beat boxing. After joining the band I have learnt a lot and the experience is really great,” He started learning beat boxing two years back after watching a video on the Internet about it and he gave it a shot. To date he has given over 80 performances. “I learnt beat boxing online from Youtube and various other websites. I practice nearly for two hours everyday,” he says. Raj says that anyone can learn beat boxing just they have to work on the vocals and enhance it. There are many websites about beat boxing; new learners can train themselves with the help of these websites. His future plan is to complete education and after studies he wants to be a professional musician.--Navin Pivhal Source: The Hans India
