Beats That Defy Boxes | Reggie Watts | TED

TED · 10.8M views · 2012-05-25 · 9:44

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Overview

Reggie Watts performs at TED 2012, blending vocal looping, beatboxing, poetry and comedy across musical genres in a larger-than-life improvised set.

On Hacker News

HN points to it as a memorable performance that doubles as a parody of TED talks and a showcase of live vocal looping.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2013–2022

Topics

Music performance & songs Stand-up & sketch comedy

What people said

bitwize · 2022-07 · Strong recommendation
Also recommend everything by Reggie Watts, a master of the vocal layering technique. His TED talk is one for the ages: [VIDEO]
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mxfh · 2013-12 · Recommendation
Reggie Watts pretty much said it all back in 2012. [VIDEO] Hard to imagine how anyone could follow up after this.
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kaycebasques · 2019-06 · Joke / meme
Your comment reminded me of Reggie Watts’ TED talk where he impersonates an intellectual TED talk by stringing together random big words in a British accent. [VIDEO]
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Sources

Video by TED, played through YouTube.

HN Library · Source license

Data and selection notes

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HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

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