Beatboxing exploits auditory streaming so one voice sounds like two lines
Evidence
Beatboxing in which a single vocalist produces percussive sounds as well as vocal sounds, sometimes simultaneously, resulting in a sound in which the sung and percussive parts are heard as two separate lines, when in fact they are a single line interspersed with each other. We hear them as separate lines due to auditory streaming based on grouping by similarity (see Section 5.5.3). In addition, since a beatboxer can only produce a single line, the sung words are broken up by the percussive sounds. However, the sung lines are perceived as being continuous due to the fact that being masked by the percussive sounds, the perceptual system joins them up as if they were not broken up based on semantic context in terms of completing the phrases to make them meaningful. — David M. Howard, Jamie Angus, Acoustics and Psychoacoustics, 1659
Categorization
- DEFINE: Concrete, vivid example of auditory streaming by similarity grouping in a real-world practice.