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ABSTRACT
This article discusses two new artistic musical traditions, beatboxing and mashups, in terms of their communal, changeable forms as displaying hallmarks often associated with folk music. Investigating the relationship between aesthetic choices and identity concerns highlights the central theme of the man-and-the-machine, the cyborg, and the inter-connected cognitive functioning of man and machine-all increasingly a part of reality at the beginning of the 21st century. KEYWORDS: mashups, copyright, music, cyborg, posthuman
INTRODUCTION
I begin this article with a look at beatboxing, a very popular musical form I have witnessed being performed in many parts of the world. Despite its popularity, beatboxing remains, for the most part, out of the realm of the recording industry, record charts, and copyright offices (with some important exceptions). Beatboxing, I will show, has moved into the global realm, with global signification, in large part due to the Internet. As such, beatboxing makes an interesting starting point from which to examine the processes, functions, and aesthetics of computer-mediated musics. It further provides useful context toward understanding the new artistic forms that are both computer generated and transmitted, and with which it often blends: mashups. Mashups are an enormously popular musical form, with hundreds of pieces being created and uploaded to the Internet every day. Like beatboxing, mashups too fall outside of usual definitions: neither copyrighted nor reproduced by the media industry, mashups have become a sign of our times, speaking volumes to the Internet's potential at allowing the "common man" to produce new artistic forms and new aesthetic choices, as well as to promulgate new identities that are both global and deeply connected with the basis for the globalism-the computer.
BEATBOXING
At first glance, beatboxing might seem like an odd choice to observe the cyborg, as it is often encountered as a live performance. If one travels to any major city in the world, one may well encounter the sounds and performances of the tradition performed in the street, the train, or indeed just about anywhere: the sound effects coming straight out of the performer's mouths, the thump-ka-thup beat, the occasional inclusion of sounds that resemble electronic sampling, the mimicking of the "scratching" of a phonograph needle grating against a vinyl LP, and so on. Sometimes, someone else might...