Tom Thum: what he can do with his mouth is seriously amazing

Meet Tom Thum, a beatboxing phenom from Brisbane, Australia.

What he can do with his mouth is seriously amazing and includes making the sounds of a full orchestra, an entire back-up choir as well as the King of Pop.

Here he is performing at the Sydney Opera House during a TEDxSydney. Thank you to NewsPoint for bringing this gem to our attention:

How does he do it? This Wired article (thanks, HuffPo) gets into the nitty gritty.

Apparently, what he's doing is using his brain in ways people do who speak other languages. He doesn't speak these languages, but he's harnessing his brain's potential to do so.

“We were very surprised to discover how closely the vocal percussion sounds resembled sounds attested in languages unknown to the beatboxer,” Michael Proctor, author of a study on beatboxing, told Wired.

“Even though his goals were musical, the beatboxer converged on methods of sound production which have been harnessed in the phonology of other human languages.”

Whoa.