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The Current Transcript for April 13, 2018

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound: Different beats].

GILLIAN FINDLAY: Just listen to that. All those sounds made with nothing more than a human voice. Beatboxing as it's called is already a featured sound in hip hop music. But aficionados. There's an awful lot more potential there. Today will going to talk to a world champion beatboxer who's using her skills for therapy. And to a scientist who is studying beatboxer's brains to understand how they do it. The answers could help people struggling to speak. Also today:.

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A new baby bot. It's named @loserdonaldtrump. Someone out there wrote some computer code to create a Twitter account with just one purpose: Pump out posts slamming Donald Trump.

GF: That was a TV report in the weeks before Donald Trump was elected president. What they're talking about is a social media bot. Different from the online trolls, bots are automated but they serve a similar purpose to try to sway political opinion online. According to researchers there turning up in Canada too. Do you trust random political messages on social media? There's a pretty good chance the messenger may not be human. We'll go there in our last half hour but we are going to begin, as we have so often this week, with this story Humboldt's Saskatchewan.

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Why did this happen?I would love to stand up here as a spiritual leader and say I have all the answers, but I don't. I don't know why. I don't know why [voice breaks].

GF: That was Sean Brandow, pastor to the Humbolt Broncos at the community vigil held on the weekend. Some questions defy easy answers or any answers at all. When we can answer them for ourselves, how do we explain them to our kids? I'm Gillian Findlay and you're listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

[Music: Theme]

Through the Humboldt tragedy, youth have found a way to 'lean on each other'

Guests: Chris Druken, Tyler Deis, Carine Dooldy

GF: It was an epic game of street hockey last night in Steveston British Columbia, a suburb of Vancouver. Over 100 kids and their parents gathered around a restaurant to honor the Humboldt Broncos by simply playing the game.

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Brian Chau 12 years old. It's just sad that so many lives taken away just one like, in one, like, second. Mom probably would have been devastated, so I am here to support them.

VOICE 1: Yes. It's scary. If I want to go play on a team and that happened, that would be horrible. Your players are like your family, to lose a bunch of people like it must be really hard.

VOICE 2: I actually knew one of the guys that lived in Langley and I just I was pretty sad. I just hope they all know that we're here and we care.

VOICE 3: Kids on Facebook and other forms of social media and it hits them hard because they'll be scrolling through and seeing all these tragic photos and people reaching out and it's hits them harder I think.

GF: Right across the country the tragedy which has now claimed 16 lives has shaken families and communities, especially those who play hockey. 18 year old Mackenzie Lloyd plays with the Leaside Junior Wildcats in Toronto. When she heard about the bus crash in Saskatchewan she shared her aggrieve on Instagram.

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I am at a loss of words. As a young kid who comes from a hockey community this tragic accident hits hard to home. Growing up I know that the bus driver ride creates the most memories, from the karaoke and the movies, to the pranks put on your teammates, for taking pictures of your buddies drooling all over the seats. Many of us can relate. No one expected this. No one. So when I heard the news my heart dropped, the pit of my stomach. I am so angry with the world. I am lashing out because I'm frustrated and I'm hurt. My body aches and mourns to these young. These little things like jersey day and putting out the hockey sticks make a big difference. It lets the families know that we care. So reach out. Cherish every Moment like your last and live for these boys, ‘cause they would do the same for you. Rest easy y'all. Live on and play from above.

GF: That was 18 year old Mackenzie Lloyd. As she mentioned yesterday was Jersey Day in Canada. Nationwide, students, parents, teachers, police officers, politicians, even pets done jerseys in support of Humboldt. They included students at R.J. Lang elementary and middle school in Toronto. Take a listen to these grade seven and eight students.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: First heard the news I was feeling really sad but I realized I they had to do something to help support the people who were also sad, and that's way we decided to have an assembly and ways to support the Humboldt Broncos.

VOICE 2: I didn't have any of their jerseys so I decided to make one of my own. I didn't want to wear like Blue Jays or like Raptors. I really wanted to wear theirs. So that's why I made my own.

VOICE 3: Here we come together as a group, as like a community, as our school community to like come to support them. We don't want to be like just on the side, just 'Oh this is so bad' but then you are not doing anything about it. So I want to show our respect to them and our support to support them.

GF: Student at R J Lang elementary and middle school in Toronto. The ripple effects of the tragedy in Saskatchewan are being felt in schools across the country, and in hockey rinks, sports arenas and neighborhoods. Parents and educators and coaches are grappling with how to talk to the children in their lives about what happened. Carine Doody is a mother of four girls and she is in Flat Rock Newfoundland and Labrador. Chris Druken is the vice principal at Mount Pearl Senior High School in Mount Royal Newfoundland and Labrador. He's also the high school hockey coach and a dad to three kids who play all kinds of sports. We reached him this morning in Mount Pearl and Tyler Deis is they head coach and general manager at the Okotoks Oilers junior A hockey team. He is in Calgary. Good morning to you all. It's been a tough week for so many people but, Tyler Deis, let me start with you. Your players would have been about the same age as many of those who died in Saskatchewan. What's this week been like for them?

TYLER DEIS: You know it's been, it's been tough. We were actually playing a game when we heard. It was a game [unintelligible] self-division finals. We didn't know the magnitude but at the end of the game [unintelligible]. But we've had a couple guys in our team that have close relationships with some of the players that were on the bus. It's definitely difficult.

GF: They knew some of the kids who died?

TYLER DEIS: Yes. So you know in junior hockey a lot of players, there was I think probably about 12 of the players on that bus that were from Alberta. Yes. So there was a couple players and obviously there is trades in hockey in some of those boys played in the Alberta Junior Hockey League previous years and stuff. So we had to play hard and take a unity. You know it's a small community.

GF: What kind of conversations have you been hearing this week?

TYLER DEIS: Well we brought a counsellor group out on Saturday and just a lot of frustration, sadness. You know some of them have, you know, they're young. You know they're young men and there's a lot of different emotions. What we are trying to do is just make sure that we have lots of people around you know it's easy for them to communicate. It's good for us because we are together as a team. So there's lots of communication. People are not at home by themselves. They're still here with each other. They're coming to the rink, [unintelligible] go on our buses and so it's good that we're doing this all together.

GF: Carine Doody. Your children are quite a bit younger I understand but they are hockey players too?

CARINE DOODY: No actually we were not a part of the hockey Community. Many of our friends neighbours are, many of our friends children are heavily involved in hockey, but my girls actually have chosen to dance. So we can have a little bit of a disconnect from the hockey world.

GF: But they've been affected by this nevertheless.

CARINE DOODY: Absolutely. Absolutely. It strikes everybody whether or not you're familiar with hockey if you're participating in hockey or not. My girls have had lots of questions and wanted to show their support as well. We didn't we don't have hockey sticks and we don't have hockey jerseys or any kind of jerseys. So what we chose to is having the girls wear their dance uniforms, so they were their dance dressed yesterday and kind of accessorized with some green and yellow to show that we are not a part of hockey but were certainly a part of this country and we're feeling the same things.

GF: How old are your girls?

CARINE DOODY: They're eight, five, three and one.

GF: So little ones. What kinds of questions have they been asking this week?

CARINE DOODY: I think as we get closer during the day they started to ask more questions and become more curious and you know they ask questions of what happens and why did it happen then. I mean it was impossible for them not to see those images of the bus crash and images that nobody wants to really look at. And you know questions especially from the eight year old came in the form of 'What happened? What were the injuries? How did they die? Were you going to die?' You know those are difficult question to answer.

GF: Did you try to protect them from any of those images and the reality, the awful reality of what did happen?

CARINE DOODY: No. You know my personal belief as a parent is to expose our children and educate our children and you know I sat down with them. They wanted to see some images, they had a glimpse of it themselves on television but I sat down and I showed them some images and I showed them you know the people who lost their lives and told them their names. I don't want to shelter my kids and make them naive to the fact that horrible things can happen. So I do let them know how that happened and showed them pictures and talking to them about it. But I think talking to them and communicating with them is a very important step.

GF: Okay I want to bring Chris Druken in here. Chris you're a high school VP, a hockey coach, a dad. What's been going through your mind this week?

CHRIS DRUKEN: I guess I was actually travelled about 1100 kilometers from home. I had to [unintelligible] coaching a hockey tournament [unintelligible] the province when we found out about the incident. That it happened. At that time, personally I guess it hit home because I spent so much time with children, in capacity as a coach and also as a teacher and travelling with students throughout the years. You know incidents like this and accidents like this can happen to happen to any one of us on any given time. I guess right away you feel know concerned for what everybody else has gone through. At the same time you come to internalise that you know how would you handle the situation, and how would your family handle situation you know giving if you were yourself in a similar type of event.

GF: Sure. You know I was struck by the young hockey player that we heard at the top of the show and she talked about being angry and being hurt by what had happened. Are you hearing that from your students?

CHRIS DRUKEN: Not necessarily. I guess all of us all react differently as individuals to these types of incidents and tragedies. I find for our students right now it's more of a shock and talking to my players you can tell often of chortler can attest to, 16, 17, 18, 19 year old sometimes get distracted easily. But this conversation came up before high school game marriage they are in our room and that's all we talk about, just about showing respect and using his game as an opportunity for a memory of those boys who lost their lives. You could see in their eyes that everybody, even though words aren't coming out, how they understand the significance of the event and the impact is going to have not only now on the families but the community and hockey communities cross-country.

GF: Tyler Deis. You talked about the bus and you know there is just so many people in this country who know about those basses. They've travelled on them as kids. They put their own kids on them. There has got to be hundreds of thousands of young people in this country who this weekend or next weekend are going to get on to a bus to travel to their next game or to their tournaments. Are your kids afraid?

TYLER DEIS: Well we've already had that experience. So to be honest with you, on Sunday we were playing the game - game five, no games six in brooks -so we got on the bus on Sunday. It was definitely a quiet bus. You know we knew that it would be going through most of the players heads and parents and wives and loved ones. It's unfortunate and I know it was there. But you know we got on there and it was a quiet bus. I've never been on a bus that quiet before. You know even our bus driver you could just imagine what's going through his head. So it's definitely tough.

GF: I mean do you do the mental gymnastics and think what am I going to do if?

TYLER DEIS: Well the biggest thing is as you know, I've talked with my players a lot here lately. You know going in such a big game here and stuff, with self-division finals for our league, yes, you just talk about where you are mentally. What we're trying to get this kids do is communicating. A lot of guys are talking to each other and stuff. And it's a tight neat group. So we do feel lucky that we're together right now.

GF: Chris I understand that one of the young men who died in Saskatchewan, Parker Tobin, was back from Newfoundland and so I am guessing that had special resonance where you are.

CHRIS DRUKEN: Yes, I guess right across country everybody is connected in some way. Even though we are such a large country, we are such a small country in the hockey community as Tyler alluded to earlier. You know kids move from one area to another. Any young man from Newfoundland obviously that brought it home to our own players here. Even to a point last night I noticed we had a high school game and my goal came in with his pads all done in a different colour; green and yellow to show his support and also heard the name of Mr. Tobin his locker and his number. So the kids, even though they are not saying much in respect to your conversation, they are showing in their own ways showing that they're supporting and that there is a connection there.

GF: Carine, you know it's hard. I can't think of another time in this country where people have been so united in grief. I mean everything the Jersey days to the sticks on porches, the crowd funding that that's raised millions of dollars. Collectively we seem to be grappling with this but each child has to come to some kind of terms with this individually. How did you help your children? What experiences did you draw on to help your children understand this and get their heads around this?

CARINE DOODY: Well I've had a couple experiences personally. You know before I had children I lost one of my sisters who was 18 years old. And although it was a horrible tragic event, it was very traumatic for the family to of the sudden death. And the thing that helped to get through there was the support of others, the phone calls, the messages, people reaching out to you to let you know that they're thinking of you and that they care for you, even you know people that you didn't know who contacted you. And I think that the main thing that we're trying to let those families know and also the other experience for us here, especially in Newfoundland was the cougar crash back in 2009, the helicopter crash. I mean it was absolutely devastating for our province and we did receive support from all across the country. And although I wasn't directly affected I did have many families who worked ashore at the time. So things like participating in vigils [unintelligible] bring flowers to the cougar helicopter building. Things like that help you with the process. It helps you rationalise your feelings. It helps you express your emotions and show support and by letting my children wear their dance dresses to you know show their support that was that was my way of teaching them to express empathy and spread love and support and that's what we want for those families.

GF: Tyler Deis. Your team, well you said they're back on the ice. In the play offs they've got to focus on the game. What have you learned about your players from watching them go through this?

TYLER DEIS: You know these thing is just the way that they're coming together. We actually play the first game of the league's final tonight, how these kids are coming together in a sense of supporting each other. I think that's probably one of the coolest things I've seen, is the support they're giving to each other, as hockey players and as humans. It's unbelievable how they, in such a tragic time, in such unfortunate thing that how people can come together.

GF: And Chris Druken what do you hope that your students, your players, your sons, your daughters what are you hoping that they're taking away from this? What are they learning?

CHRIS DRUKEN: I guess similar to what the conversations unfolding, Tyler was just talking about the strength that exists in people even though time seems so tragic and so dark, is that today's young people find ways to to connect with others even though they may not necessarily know them and be able to realise you know the escape happened to people. But we can reach out through our acts such as the vigils, the Jersey days through the gold ceremonies, in small things such as a ribbon on a hockey stick, that can show people so far away that you're not alone. And I find students, we were on our Easter break when the accident happened. So our students came back and I was approached right away by members in our school community. They wanted to do jersey day. And what I really find overwhelmingly positive about is the kids want to do something. They haven't been told they've got to react in a certain way but they're find it in their own way to help each other get through this and have an opportunity to lean on each other. I hope my children do, even though we haven't had a lot of conversations about, they understand there is someone else there all the time, that they can get help from.

GF: Been quite a week. All right. Well thank you all for joining us today. Chris Druken is the VP at Mount Pearl Senior High School in Mount Pearl Newfoundland and Labrador. Carine Doody's the mother of four girls and she was in Flat Rock Newfoundland and Labrador and Tyler Deis is the head coach and general manager at the Okotoks Oilers Junior A Hockey Ream. He joined us from Calgary. So stay with us. The CBC News is next and then speech therapists have a new tool to help unlock words for people struggling to speak. It's beat boxing. Find out more and why neuroscientists are also interested. That's coming up in our next half hour. I 'm Gillian Findlay and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

Music in mind and mouth: How beatboxing is helping kids with speech problems

Guests: Kaila Mullody, Sophie Scott, Daniel Lavitin

GF: Hello I'm Gillian Findlay and you're listening to the Friday edition of The Current. Still to come today you've probably heard of online trolls but what about bots? They're automated social media accounts created to swing voters to or away from a particular candidate. They were a big feature in the last U.S. presidential election and they're starting to turn up in Canadian campaigns too. We'll dive into the world of bots in half an hour. But first the world of beat boxing.

SOUNDCLIP

[Music]

GF: That is Kaila Mullady, world champion beatboxer performing with her partner Mark Martin. They're making all those sounds remarkably with just their voices. No instruments. Beatboxing is a fascinating style of music but it's also getting attention in the field of speech therapy. In addition to performing Kaila and Mark work with kids who have delayed speech, kids like Brendan Mullady cablers 13 year old cousin.

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KAILA: So just go over some beatboxing sounds like we practice those. You know when I talk in beatbox, like [Talking in beatbox: Can you break it down]. I want to show you that. And then we'll make a beat on a loop station. Can we hear some of your beatboxing first of all, because you just did it a lot on the staircase and I can tell you've been practising because it sounds amazing.

[Sound: Brendan trying to beat box]

KAILA: Today we are in Long Island and were visiting my cousin who actually inspires my part on the beatboxing and speech therapy curriculum. We're going to work with him today and just make a song with him and help with his articulation and speech.

[Sound: Cheers and applause]

KAILA: So when Mark and are beatboxing, when we do like [beatboxes] we're doing three letters. So let's hear- I heard your 'P'. Your 'P' sounded really awesome. That's called the base drum. So let hear your Them when you hear that's called the bass drum rates when you hear bass drum sound.

[Sound: Brendan trying to beatbox]

[Sound: Cheers]

KAREN: My name is Karen. Brendan is my son. He's 13 years old.

KAILA: So why don't we play- we're gonna play a game okay. The game is called Follow the Leader. So the first one goes like this: Puh... Puh... Puh.

KAREN: He was non-verbal up until the time he was in third grade and then he was diagnosed with Apraxia which is an oral motor disease. He wasn't even announcing the letters in the alphabet until Kaila has tried working with them and teaching him how to say the different letters with beatboxing. He went from a non-verbal kid to complete sentences, complete talking.

[Sound: Beatboxing]

BRENDAN: We make a beat with my voice.

KAREN: And now he's full sentences. He's not always clear and discernible but you are able to understand. He's able to communicate all of his needs right now. He can talk to his friends. He can go out and have a full complete life.

KAILA: So of we beat rhyme that word, what would it sound like?

BRENDAN: [Beatboxing]

KAILA: And then what does that 'I' sound?

BRENDAN: 'A'.

KAILA: Good. [To producer] Brendan is an inspiration to me because he is the reason why I made this connection. Without him seeing him work with this speech pathologist I don't know if I ever would have really correlated this in the way that I did.

[Brendan and Kaila practising in the background].

KAILA: [Cheering] That's my man. That's my man. That's my man.

GF: That was beatboxer Kaila Mullady working there with her young cousin Brendan. Kaila Mullady now joins me from New York City. Hello.

KAILA MULLADAY: Hey how you doing?

GF: Well I want to get to what got you thinking that beatboxing might be good for speech therapy. But before we do that I want you to explain what it is that you do.

KAILA MULLADAY: So beatboxing saying is basically imitating different instruments with your human instrument. So you can do drums [beatboxes], basses [beatboxes], trumpets [beatboxes]. Basically put together and you make a beat like [beatboxes]. So it's really fun. It really just allows people to express themselves fully and find the power of their voice.

GF: [Laughs] But because we're were only hearing you here. What physically are you doing with your voice, with your lips, with your nasal passages?

KAILA MULLADAY: So a lot of it is lips and your tongue. Right so if I do the 'K' sound it's actually the middle of my tongue on the roof of my mouth. If I do the 'P' sound. It's just my lips coming together and putting a lot of pressure to make that sound. So basically if you have tongue, you have teeth, you have lips, you have lungs and you have a good imagination, anyone in the world can beatbox no matter if you they're old or young.

GF: And did you teach yourself.

KAILA MULLADAY: Actually I did. Yes. I've been beatboxing since, man had in bit first grade, second grade. I remember in fourth grade doing it in class and people were really into it. And this kid James telling me that I was beatboxing and I was just like okay.

GF: You had no idea what that was. You just liked to make sounds?

KAILA MULLADAY: Absolutely. I mean what kid doesn't like to make sounds. I think that's why this really works with kids as well because instead of them coming into a class where we say okay sit down and be quiet, we say actually make as much noise as you want. The only thing I want you to do is listen to each other and not be afraid to speak up.

GF: Okay. So then why is this a good use, a good instrument to use in speech therapy.

KAILA MULLADAY: So when I'm beatboxing as you heard a little bit in the clip be boxing is all letters. So when I'm beatboxing I'm just articulating all of the letters in my speech. And even as we beatboxers the way that we teacher and the way that we write it on paper, if I want to show someone [beatboxes] I'll write down PTK. So it has a direct correlation to letters. Also it's extremely fun. What I noticed with Brendan was when a speech pathologist would come over it would be after school and no kid wants to come home from school and continue to go work, especially when his brother and sister weren't doing that. So a lot of times he would kind of shut down or hide under the table or run away. And when I was babysitting I was like I felt the duty of having to make this class work. So as soon as we started adding the beatboxing element into it that's when he sat down and he was fully engaged with his teacher. He would sit down for the hour and if she held up a card that said baseball, instead of him just saying baseball, he would say [beatboxing:'baseball... baseball bat']. And he would make beats and what me and his speech pathologists noticed that you know even when she was gone he was practising is beat boxing. So a lot of the things that we find is you know kids aren't going to go home and really want to hold up flash cards and just say these words over and over again, but with beatboxing and I call it sneaking vegetables into the fruit smoothie. They don't even know that they're working on their speech because they just think that they're practising their beats and making music. And there's so many videos on YouTube now, and what I really love about is and you know in speech pathology when you're there, when you're in the speech therapy class, it is kind of telling you that there's something wrong with you, that you're not speaking as well as other people. But when you're a beatboxer your superstar. We literally are telling these kids that they can do anything that they want with their instrument with their mouth. And when they go back into school and they start beatboxing for people they get huge positive reinforcement because people are like 'Wow! wWat are you doing!' So we kind of take what these kids were told that they're not good at and then we give them superpowers with it. And you can see the excitement on their faces when they're there.

GF: What kind of results have you seen with the kids you've worked with?

KAILA MULLADAY: Well it's been really amazing. Last summer we did a 20 class for 10 weeks. We offered free speech therapy classes in New York City to families. We got about eight kids and by the end of it we heard from parents that teachers were going to the parents and asking them what they were doing with their kids. Because the teachers not even knowing that they were doing this work with us could see the difference and their students. And we had another parent who said that she's been taking her son to speech therapy for three years and what we got out of him in 20 sessions was more than three years. And it's not that beatboxing is the only way to do speech therapy. It's not at all. This is just a tool for a speech pathologist or speech therapist to use or even be boxers to use that just makes it fun for the kids. I'm a firm believer in arts education and that when you make learning fun that kids are going to want to do it. They're going to go home and be practising when you're not there.

GF: So is it really just creating the enthusiasm around it? I mean are you actually teaching them in different skill than the speech pathologist would be trying to teach?

KAILA MULLADAY: It's the same skills. When I do beat rhyming right when we say [beatboxes: 'Baseball bat']. Understanding the parts of the word that's a phonemic awareness. And when he makes sounds we do rhymes. So rhyming words for kids to be able to distinguish that 'at' and 'bat' rhyme and have the same ending, that's a huge part of speech pathology. We're doing the same thing that's speech pathologists are doing. We're just doing it in a different way. And I think for us our goal is to work more in hand with speech therapists for them to also help us on our journey and for them to help us make our curriculum and our course more academically sound. I want this for all speech therapists and even you know beatboxers to be able to use this as a tool. And I want to make it for them as well something that they can use and feel comfortable and confident using with their students.

GF: Are some of these kids pretty good beatboxers?

KAILA MULLADAY: Oh my gosh yes. It's actually incredible. They teach me stuff.

GF: Thank you Kaila, Kaila Mullady is a world champion beatboxer who uses beatboxing in speech therapy. She was in New York City.

SOUNDCLIP

[Beatboxing]

GF: That is a British beatboxer group by the name of Reeps One. Along with Kaila Mullady, he's participating in a research study exploring the science of beatboxing. Some of those multi layer and complex sounds you've heard are technically impossible to do with traditional phonetics. So scientists want to know more about how beatboxers do it. The hope is that they'll be able to use that knowledge to help people for whom talking is difficult. Stroke victims for instance. Sophie Scott studies beatboxers. She is a professor at University College London. London is where we have reached her today. Hi there.

SOPHIE SCOTT: Hi. Hello.

GF: When we talk about science of beatboxing what are we talking about?

SOPHIE SCOTT: Well there's a couple of different things that we've been doing scientifically with beatboxing. We've been trying to work out more about actually how boxers make the sounds that they're making. And we do that by trying to image what's called the vocal tracks. All the stuff used to produce the instruments the human voice so the larynx and the space at the back of the tongue the shape of the tongue and the lips. So we do that by running out of the magnetic resonance imaging scanner actually has a video camera looking at the movements. And we also try and ask questions about how the brain is controlling that. So we go in and we look at the neural system are recruited when beatboxers are doing different kinds of things with their voices.

GF: What are you finding?

SOPHIE SCOTT: Well we've found quite interestingly that if you compare beatboxers listening to beatboxing, so think about it as an expertise where you've acquired a skill with a musical instrument, and you compare them to electric guitar players listening to guitar music or people who are not musicians at all. What you find is that you get particular networks of the brain associated with you know the expertise in playing an instrument recruited, when a beatbox to listen to beatboxing, that's actually very similar to what you see when the guitar players listen to guitar playing. You could actually see the listening brain being shaped by the musical experience that people have in producing those sounds. It's harder to look at the production side of it but we've been doing so at this stage we are finding networks in the brain associated with the production of sound for beatboxing. And also as I say learning more about simply how people are using their articulators to make the sound by demonstrating them with our scanners.

GF: So what got you interested in doing this research?

SOPHIE SCOTT: I got very interested in different kinds of vocal expertise because if you work in speech and language you tend to get caught up as I have for many years, on the fact that language is amazing and very complicated and speech is an extraordinary skill. I mean it's incredible that you and I are doing what we're doing now and understanding each other. There is actually only one thing we can do with our voice. And there's a tremendous variety of different things people can do with their voices. People can do all sorts of different kinds of singing, people can do different sorts of vocal mimicry. And that's actually something I got very interested in and I was looking at vocal impressionists and trying to find out more about how they were doing good impressions of different talkers. And somebody in my lab said you know we should be doing beatboxing, we should look into this. And so postdocs from my lab and [unintelligible] went to the UK beatboxing championship [laughs] and they literally leant over the barrier at the front door, were shouting at people on stage 'Can we scan your brain?' And that's how we found Reeps One, Harry and he's been amazing because he's an incredibly talented beatboxer, and he is also very interested in what he's doing, but he's also very integrated into the beatboxing community. So he's been fantastic at helping us find and contact other beatboxers.

GF: Clearly it's a rather rare skill. What role do genetics play here? Are some people born to be beatboxers and other people- just like some people are tone deaf?

SOPHIE SCOTT: It's a very good question. I think part of it is simply access. It's not something that we tend to encourage. We certainly don't teach people to do this. So beatboxers tend to get into it as something they do themselves. But your point about genetics is very interesting because we are just at the start of beginning a study with in Nijmegen in Holland who have been doing an enormous set of studies looking at the genetic basis for language variation, how people can be more or less affected by different kinds of problems in spoken language. They're interested in looking at beatboxing as a way of looking at vocal expertise without confounding it necessarily with questions about language or language opportunity, but taking as an example of a learnt skill. We didn't find anything in people who are really good beatboxes that might differentiate them from the rest of the population.

GF: What do you see as the applications? We've talked about speech therapy but are there applications beyond that?

SOPHIE SCOTT: I think the applications in speech therapy are likely to be huge. Because historically in speech therapy what we do is we take somebody who has a problem with speech and we give them speech sounds to practice. So we're giving them something which they struggle to do. And what we've not been good at is approaching or thinking about how other disciplines approach vocal learning and vocal change. I think there's a lot we learned for example from how beatboxers approach producing different sorts of sounds by not worrying too much about language at all, but thinking about sound. Think about it as music exactly like you saw in those earlier demonstrations. I think that can be a really powerful approach because the thought is standing up and speaking and your voice not being clear in the words you say makes life very very hard, whereas if we say you know what don't worry about speech at all. Let's make some really interesting fun musical sounds. That's a completely different approach that would let people practice exactly the same sort of skills they'll need for speech. So without that terrible burden of not speaking clearly, I can't understand you. So I think it's a really important step forward. I think is the only really helpful for work with children but I suspect it's going to be very important to work with adults and of course more generally because it is a fantastic example of an acquired vocal skill. I as a scientist am really interested in what they can teach us about how we acquire this kind of expertise in the brain and that could helps us understand in much more general sense how we could help people who for example had a stroke. Because if we can understand expertise in learning that might help us promote expertise in learning in the brain.

GF: Thanks so much for joining us today.

SOPHIE SCOTT: Thank you very much.

GF: Sophie Scott is a professor and researcher at the University College of London and we reached her in London England.

SOUNDCLIP

[Beatboxing]

GF: The relationship between music and neuroscience has long fascinated researchers. Daniel Levitin is a professor emeritus of psychology and music at Montreal's McGill University. He's also a musician and author of the book This is your Brain on Music. And we have reached him in Hollywood California. Hello.

DANIEL LEVITIN: Hi Gillian.

GF: Well what are you thinking as you've been listening to Sophie and to Kaila talk about the work they're doing with beatboxing.

DANIEL LEVITIN: Well it's very exciting. As Kayla said in addition to motivating people who were having speech and language difficulties to focus on improving their communication abilities. She's actually teaching some of the syllables that they need in order to communicate. 'P' Peter, 'T' like tango, 'F' like Foxtrot. And although not all of the sounds that beatboxers make are part of the English language, she is developing this phonemic awareness, a focus on what your mouth and its constituent parts are doing in the service of communication.

GF: I'm interested in this whole question of how music affects the brain. Does it actually physically change what's happening in the brain?

DANIEL LEVITIN: Well it does but of course everything does. Our conversation is changing our brains and going for a walk in the snow changes your brain. I mean that's what learning and experience are. They are chemical and electrical changes in brain state. The ways that music changes the brain can be positive or negative. The positive side of listening to music that you like starts a cascade of neurochemical events releasing pleasure hormones such as dopamine and the brain's own opioids. Music that you don't like can cause a really aversive response including the production of gluco corcoids, stress hormones, that can increase your heart rate and your blood pressure and give you a sour taste in your mouth.

GF: So how do you think boxing compares to other kinds of music? Would there be different neurochemical changes that take place as a result of listening or participating in it?

DANIEL LEVITIN: The beginning, Gillian, it depends on whether you like it or not. I mean if you like beat boxing you're going to get the same pleasurable sense that you might get from listening to Mahler or maybe Biz Markie will do for you what Brian Adams does for someone else. The next level down I would say is the interesting thing about beatboxing is that although we don't know for sure, I'm speculating based on those little bit of early evidence, that it activates both speech and musical centers as music with lyrics would matter trusting. It creates a fuller and richer experience.

GF: Speaking music and the examples you use. We've got one lined up here so I want you to take a listen for a minute to Ella Fitzgerald.

SOUNDCLIP

[Ella Fitzgerald scatting]

GF: So what's happening to my brain as I listen to it?

DANIEL LEVITIN: In their fantastic way, you and I are both going to be in good mood for the rest of the day.

GF: Hard not to be, I think.

DANIEL LEVITIN: You know again if you like Gillian you're going to be experiencing a kind of opioid and dopamine high. It could last for a little while, to keep you in a good mood for a while. Part of it is it sounds like she is in a good mood and good moods are contagious.

GF: It also sounds as though that she's beatboxing, almost. What's the difference what she is doing and what Kaila was doing, for instance?

DANIEL LEVITIN: Well so she's emulating musical instrument there. I mean she's she's trying to do with her voice what a saxophone might do in a solo. And I'd say the difference is she's not overtly trying to sound like a saxophone. There are people that do that. Generally when she's scatting she's not trying to make you think that you're hearing another instrument. And she's taking some of the qualities of that instrument and rendering them with her voice. But again as Sophie was saying it's not mimicry. It's not like she's literally doing impressions.

GF: And so scatting and beatboxing, are there other comparable kinds of music that you've studied from around the world?

DANIEL LEVITIN: Well this is a long tradition. We tend to think of beatboxing as Nouvel but as you just demonstrated to all of us it goes back at least to the 1950s with Ella, Lewis Armstrong before that. And of course in North America there is a tradition of the talking blues that goes back to the early 1900s and then when we look at other cultures in Africa, India, for centuries there has been a tradition of people making musical instruments sounds particularly percussion sounds with their mouths just because they can.

GF: So why is it important do you think to better understand this kind of music?

DANIEL LEVITIN: Well I think that there is a lot of answers to that. When I think about it. You know historically the original Star Trek series used to open up with the quote 'Space the final frontier' a great Canadian William Shatner right. I think it's not the final frontier. I think the brain is we know relatively little about it. We have mapped the universe to a great extent but we haven't mapped the brain very well yet. It's the most complex biological organism we know of in the universe and any information we can get about it is going to be helpful. How it works in normal situations, how it malfunctions in other situations all of that is the kind of basic science that is going to support being able to treat people as Sophie said who are victims of stroke, Alzheimer's disease, other injuries are brain diseases. Just knowing how the circuits work is is vital information at these early stages.

GF: All right. Well thank you so much for joining us today.

DANIEL LEVITIN: Thank you Gillian.

SOUNDCLIP

[Beatboxing]

GF: That was Daniel Levitan Professor Emeritus of Psychology and music at McGill University. Now make sure you stay to until the end of our show today because Kaila Mullady is going to be back with beatboxing 101. I am Gillian Findlay and you are listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

Can Canadians spot a political bot? Fair elections may depend on it

Guests: Ben Nimmo, Elizabeht Dubois

GF: I'm Gillian Findlay and you are listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

ADRIENNE ARSENAULT: A curious thing happened in the run up to last night's debate in watching the Twitter traffic social media firms Cision pointed something out to us in the newsroom. A brand new political voice getting noisy online.

VOICE 1: 100 percent, it's a new baby bot.

ADRIENNE ARSENAULT: Its name @LoserDonaldTrump. Someone out there wrote some computer code to create a Twitter account with just one purpose; pump out posts slamming Donald Trump.

VOICE 1: It's really interesting. It takes all comments about @RealDonaldTrump's or Donald Trump's Twitter handle. And then any comment that use the word 'loser', #lose or just the word loser and it finds those in it shares them indiscriminately.

GF: So that was a report from Adrienne Arseneault on The National in October 2016 just weeks before the U.S. presidential election. What they're talking about are online bots, automated social media accounts whose sole purpose is to swing political opinion online and perhaps swing an election. That particular bought was targeting Donald Trump. Many others took aim at Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. Elizabeth Dubois warns that as much as we may like to think politics has played differently here, Canada is not immune to bot's. She's an assistant professor in the Department of Communications at the University of Ottawa and she has dug deep into the political uses and possible abuses of bots in Canada. Elizabeth Dubois is with me now in our Toronto studio. Hello welcome.

ELIZABETH DUBOIS: Hello. Thanks for having me.

GF: Okay. For the Luddites in the crowd and I'll include myself what exactly is a bot?

ELIZABETH DUBOIS: So when I'm talking about bots I'm talking about social media bots specifically and these are social media accounts that have been created by a person, and then that person has written some bit of code or has found code somewhere else and they have made it so that that bot starts automatically posting or liking or sharing or following. Any kinds of activities that a human using a social media account could do, a bot can be automated to do.

GF: And what purposes are they use for?

ELIZABETH DUBOIS: There's a bunch of different purposes and some of them are actually really great and some of them are not so great for our democracy. We've got four different types that Fenwick McKelvey a researcher at Concordia and I have identified. We've got amplifiers, dampeners, servants and transparency bots. And so those amplifiers and dampeners they're the ones that we hear a lot about because they're the ones that are trying to manipulate and shift the version of public opinion that you see from social media. They're the ones that are trying to push one message way beyond all of the others or hide a message, push it out of the public discourse altogether.

GF: Well bots have got a rather bad reputation I think in large part because of the Russian interference in the US and other Western countries elections. Do they deserve that reputation?

ELIZABETH DUBOIS: Not necessarily some of them, for sure, when we have foreign interference in the election that's not a great thing. When we have bots that are trying to manipulate public opinion make people think that one candidate is way more interesting and exciting and important than they organically are. Or when we're pushing voices out so they can't participate in democratic conversation; problematic. But we've got some really great bots too that do really useful things.

GF: Okay well fair enough but let's talk about the bad ones.

[Laughter].

GF: Give me an example of how bots have been used in political campaigns in Canada?

ELIZABETH DUBOIS: So in the Canadian context there's not a ton of examples yet but we've got a few that are starting to emerge. Fenwick and I did a study looking at the PC leadership race here in Ontario, trying to understand whether or not there was a example of bot behaviour showing up. And we found that there was one hashtag #CrookedChristine that had been created. I'll note that it was not a very successful hashtag campaign.

GF: This would have been Christine Elliott who is running against Rob Ford.

ELIZABETH DUBOIS: Exactly exactly.

GF: And where did that bot originate, you know?

ELIZABETH DUBOIS: So we don't know who created it. We suspect that it is somebody within Canada rather than Russian interference or other sorts of foreign interference. But we don't have specific details because it's really easy to kind of spoof your location or just not tell Twitter where your location is.

GF: What was his bot saying about Christine Elliott?

ELIZABETH DUBOIS: So what we found was a range of different accounts that were all tweeting very similar things basically negative things about Christine Elliott positive things about the Ford Nation campaign. And we saw that there were multiple accounts that were all created just around the exact same time within 15 minutes of each other. They were all brand new. They all had stock images from Google as their profile pic. They all had kind of basic descriptions. Brand new accounts that were tweeting the same things using the same hashtags. Not talking about anything else, solely focused on this one issue.

GF: Now you say you didn't find this was particularly effective.

ELIZABETH DUBOIS: No it wasn't. There wasn't a whole lot of people jumping on the bandwagon. The way amplifier bots which these ones would be tend to work is once you hit kind of a critical threshold of interest, that's fake created by bots, other people start jumping on board and so then you get a whole lot of organic real humans jumping on and promoting that message too. And we didn't see it reach that level where more people were jumping onboard.

GF: But the potential is there.

ELIZABETH DUBOIS: Exactly. And this was I think a test balloon. I think we're likely to see a lot more political campaigners, volunteers, third party organizations testing out what they can do with social media what they can do with automation in the upcoming Ontario election and in 2019 in the next federal election.

GF: You know on the face of it they don't seem so threatening. And I'm guessing that most people listening would think well you know I can spot a bot. And I will recognise it as an attempt to manipulate me and I'm not going to fall for that. But would most of us be wrong?

ELIZABETH DUBOIS: Yes there's two big problems with that thinking. One is we are way more confident in our ability to spot bots than we actually are. And but creators are consistently getting better if they don't want to be found, they're going to keep finding ways to circumvent the processes we've found to try and identify them. And so bomb detection is increasingly difficult. The other problem is the vast majority of Canadians who encounter information that has been manipulated by bots were never the Twitter users themselves or the ones engaged in the Facebook chats or on Reddit or wherever else these bots are acting. The vast majority of Canadians who encounter information that's been manipulated by bots actually encounter it through traditional media.

GF: That have picked up the information in the bought and amplified it even further.

ELIZABETH DUBOIS: Exactly exactly. And so if reporters and journalists aren't aware of bots and benching him and identifying when bots are likely to have impacted the trending topic that they're talking about or amplified a tweet that they've taken as an example of what the public thinks or feels, then a much wider population who has no real interaction with bots, no firsthand knowledge of how to deal with them doesn't even recognise that bots might have come into play.

GF: But aren't bots, even the malicious ones aren't they just another way of candidates or causes getting their message out? I mean what makes them any different than or more to various than any other communication tool?

ELIZABETH DUBOIS: I think that's a really good point and I don't actually think that they are so bad that we should ban them all. I think that we should be aware of when these bots are being used, when automation is coming into play. And so something that Fenwick and I have been calling for is a code of conduct around bots. We think that political parties and third parties active in an election period should be saying 'Hey we are using bots. This is when and how and why we're using them', and then that gives the public and journalism enough knowledge to know how to interpret the information coming through social media and how to adjust their own expectations and decision making.

GF: How would a code of conduct work?

ELIZABETH DUBOIS: It would be something along the lines of here's a set of information that we agree to make transparent and available. We're going to all the political parties put it on one website for example. We're going to register. These are the bots that we're making use of how, why, when you were contacting. And then if new bots show up that nobody has said 'Oh yeah that's mine' then we can go to the political parties and say 'Hey you guys said you weren't using any. Are you sure this isn't yours?' And assuming that they've been truthful which would be in their interest because nobody wants a new scandal during an election period, then we know that those aren't the people or the organisations that we need to be worried about we can go look elsewhere. So it helps the party kind of protect themselves from getting caught up in a scandal around this. Similar to robo-calls is the one that I think a lot about.

GF: We heard about in the last election. So what is it as we head into an election year next year what should consumers, what should people be doing as they scan their Twitter and Facebook feeds?

ELIZABETH DUBOIS: I think the number one thing at this point is awareness. You need to be aware that political bots exist and that whether or not the political parties sign onto a code of conduct they are going to be used. And you need to be diligent in recognising that information is not necessarily as it seems. It's basic media literacy that I think we have to have across all of the different sources of political information that we've got.

GF: All right Elizabeth Dubois, thanks so much for coming in today. Elizabeth Dubois is an assistant professor in the Department of Communications at the University of Ottawa and she was with me in our Toronto studio. My next guest has been tracking the rise of bots in political discourse worldwide. He's also been the victim of a bot attack. Ben Nimmo is the senior fellow with the digital forensic research lab at the Atlantic Council. And we reached him today in Edinburgh Scotland. Hello.

BEN NIMMO: Hello.

GF: How does the use of bots in Canada, that we've been talking about here, compare to what you're seeing in other places around the world?

BEN NIMMO: From what I've read and from what Elizabeth's been saying it seems to be following a very similar pattern to what we've seen elsewhere but it looks like it is on a lower level of activity for the moment. I've seen bot nets operating in Poland, in France, and South Africa, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the USA, Italy. Bots are pretty much an international phenomenon. And really the question is how many are there in any particular given political environment. It looks like it it's a fairly small amount in Canada relatively speaking. But that would tend to suggest that people are starting to use them, now you'd probably like to stick likely to see more of them in the coming months and years.

GF: I think there were there was a research study from the Pew Research Center released just this this week showing that 66 percent of links to the Internet's most popular sites came from automated accounts. That seems phenomenal.

BEN NIMMO: It's very high. This goes back to the point that Elizabeth was making that model bots and bad bots. Lots of bots are out there for entirely legitimate purposes such as news organizations. If you want to publish a story on your Twitter feed and your Facebook feed and Instagram at the same time, you don't want to employ somebody to do it you just want a bot to do that. So it's important to keep it in perspective that what we're talking about here is the malicious bots, the political bots. That's not the same thing as all the bots in the system.

GF: Give us some examples then of those malicious bots that are being used politically. What have you seen?

BEN NIMMO: There's a variety of ways they used. For example it was a very clumsy bot attack in Poland last summer which ironically was was using the hashtag #astroturfing, astroturfing being the policy of using bots to make it look like you've got a real grassroots movement. And what happened was it was an unknown user that decided that they were going to launch the hashtag #StopAstroturfing and they turned on about 15,000 bots all of which posted the same hashtag within the space of four or five minutes. So if you think of a diagram of the traffic you have a flat line and then a sudden ridiculous spike. And then within a couple of minutes it drops back to zero.

GF: And who was using that?

BEN NIMMO: We don't know who was behind it. You can you can judge from the behaviour what kind of political leanings they have. But it's not like a bot has a signature of who created the botnet. So this was somebody who was supporting the Polish government who was criticising Poles who were protesting against the government and was accusing them of being astroturfed. But who exactly it was. We don't know. But it was a very crude attack. It didn't get real users interacting with it. It didn't really go very far. You can compare that with something we saw in France early last year and the buildup to the presidential election where there was a group of supporters of Marine Le Pen the leader of the far right candidate. Every week they would decide on a hashtags that they were going to launch. They would announce it in advance and then at ten minutes to 5:00 p.m. French time half a dozen accounts would launch the same hashtags literally simultaneously down to the second. And then they'd have a really interesting shell of a mixture of human accounts and bots retweeting them and then retweeting each other and then posting some memes and then retweeting those. So that in the space of maybe an hour this group would generate 45,000 Tweets. And every single time they did it they managed to make their hash tag the number one trending topic in France.

GF: That's created the illusion that there was I gather huge support.

BEN NIMMO: That's right. Because once you've got it into the trending list people who aren't in your little echo chamber, people who aren't in this case supporters are followers of Marine Le Pen, are going to see the hashtag as well because it'll show up in the trending bar on Twitter. And a lot of the time when we see people using bots what they're trying to do is get their hashtag to trend because social media a huge platform that they are divided into an infinite number of very small echo chambers you've got your friendship group in your political group and those who like you and follow you. And so the challenge is breaking out of your little bubble and reaching users who aren't interested in what you do and the way to do that is to target the trending list.

GF: What is the evidence that they are actually effective? I mean Marine Le Pen did not prevail in the French election. Do they work?

BEN NIMMO: It varies from place to place. And again as Elizabeth was saying a lot of the time they work when journalists pick up on them and don't realise that what they're picking up on is a bomb strike. So you'll see a hashtag will start trending and then the tech journalist will start writing about it, although the social media journalists will start writing about it as a new topic which is trending. And all news outlets are doing this. Everybody scanning the Internet to see what's interesting, what's a quirky kind of story? And so you'll tend to see that on their own. Staying on the platform they'll have a limited effect it's when they get picked up by real journalists and reported on that then that will ripple across a far bigger area.

GF: But I guess there is a difference between just creating noise about something and actually changing people's minds. Isn't there?

BEN NIMMO: There is but that there are specific examples where we know bots have been used to send content viral. And there's a particularly good example from the U.S. election in October 2016, where at the time when WikiLeaks were dumping everyday e-mails which had been hacked from Hillary Clinton's campaign manager John Podesta by Russian intelligence these were being published. On one particular day an unknown user took a quote out of context from one of these e-mails and tried to twist it to make it look as if one of Clinton's own advisers had blamed her for the death of U.S. diplomats in Benghazi. Now that was launched on Twitter. It got very little traction to start with but then somebody turned on a bot nets and gave it a couple of thousand tweets within a couple of minutes that really pushed the story out there. Other users then began picking up on it and circulating it, and within a few hours then candidate Donald Trump quotes it exactly that misquote in a campaign rally and was seen live on national TV by millions of people. And that was a case where if the bots hadn't intervened and given it that initial shove, it is very unlikely that that story would have gained traction. But because you had that push from the bottom to start with, a tweet which has a couple of thousand tweets within a few minutes tends to carry this false head of credibility. Real users will look at it and think wow that's got a couple of thousand tweets already. It must be an interesting story. And so they will jump on it and start tweeting it as well. And that's what happened in this case. And within a few hours it ended up being quoted at a campaign rally.

GF: So what scares you about this?

BEN NIMMO: What scares me the most is the extent to which normal users don't get the difference between bots and humans. And particularly now we're in this very dangerous position where lots of people have heard of bots but they're not quite sure what they are. And so they'll tend to label anybody they're having an argument with on Twitter as a bot. Empathically nowadays they'll label it as a Russian bot. And so I regularly see conversations online where two people will be disagreeing about something. And then at a certain point one of them insults the other by calling them a bot or a Russian bot. Well frankly if you're having an argument with it, it's almost certain not to be a bot. Ninety nine percent of bots do read tweets and likes and follows. They don't write their own content. So we're at the stage where people have sort of heard of bots but they're not really quite sure what they are, they are aware that they're a bad thing. But that's kind of where the knowledge stops. And like I say a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing because it means that genuine bot researches tend to get discredited, because when my team call out a bot we do a lot of work. We say here's all the evidence to prove that this is a bot, but will then get attacked by being told well everybody calls things bots. How are you different? And it's also dangerous because it's reducing the credibility of online conversation generally. [Cross talk] believing anybody they argue with is a is a bot then then you've kind of destroyed the whole foundation of debate.

GF: You yourself became a victim of a bot attack didn't you?

BEN NIMMO: I was the target of the bot attack. I think in the end it was the bots who were the victims.

GF: Okay but why were you targeted?

BEN NIMMO: Okay so this was a story which happened last summer after the Charlottesville riots in the US and my team and I did some research showing that a lot of the far right activists in the US were borrowing the narrative they were borrowing their main arguments from them from Kremlin propaganda. And that was that was an interesting link for us between Russian propaganda and far right propaganda in the US. We ran an article on this and the article was then picked up by pro Publica which is an online news site in the United States. As soon as Pro Publica published this there was a Twitter account created which only had 76 followers. It tweeted an attack on the Pro Publica team. So it just tweeted insults about them calling them an old left hate group but it tagged all the Pro Publica journalists in the tweet. So that every time that tweet would get retweeted it would show up in those journalists mentions. And then they use 23,000 bots to retweet that message. So 23,000 times that day, the guys at Pro Publica were getting pinged in their notifications being called an left her hate group. And if you had 23,000 notifications coming into your account you can't do anything else with it. It melts down. It's like a major cyber-attack.

GF: So how did you fight that? What happened?

BEN NIMMO: So the Pro Publica guys contacted me and asked 'Can you have a look at this?' And I looked at the bottom which was doing all there tweets and it was a botnet that I recognised, because this was a this was a bot net with tens of thousands of accounts but they only had about 100 profile pictures to share between them. So you get the same profile pictures cropping up time and again on different accounts and these were profile pictures that I’d already seen earlier that year, targeting a journalist who was ranting about Russia in Ukraine. So it looked like this was a bot net which was being used to intimidate people who were criticising Russia. So I did an article on this saying look this looks like a pro Kremlin botnet being used to harass people. And I actually showed some of the profile pictures which had been used, and some of the accounts which have been used I went into a lot of detail. And that meant that I actually exposed the bot net publicly and the bot herders really really didn't like that because bot herders don't like being exposed. And so the next step was that they created a fake copy of the Twitter account of my boss and they tweeted that I was dead, that I died that morning, and they used about 23,000 bots to retweet that post and they tagged everybody in my team. So that that day we all got thousands of notifications that I was dead. And then the thing just- It was weird the whole the whole thing just cascaded. The Atlantic Council for which we work started tweeting about us and they had over 100,000 retweets from bots. This was a this was a 106,000 strong botnet. And then people started tweeting about the bot attack on our team and then they started getting the same treatment. They would get two thousands retweets per minutes. So it was like the bots had gone rogue.

GF: Ben that is that is a terrific cautionary tale. We've run out of time though so I'm going to have to leave it there. Thanks so much for joining us today. Ben Nimmo is the senior fellow with the Atlantic Council's digital forensic research lab and we reached him in Edinburgh today. So before we go we want to leave you with a word from the team that made this show this week.

GEOFF TURNER: Hello I'm Geoff Turner, one of the producers here at The Current. This week the show was produced by: Alison Masemann, Howard Goldenthal, Pacinthe Mattar, Idella Sturino, Julie Crysler, Samira Mohyeddin, Ines Colabrese , Kristin Nelson, Liz Hoath, John Chipman, Karin Marley, and Danielle Carr. Special thanks to Anne Penman in Vancouver, Mary-Catherine McIntosh in Halifax, Susan Mackanzie in Montreal, Michael O'Halloran in Calgary, Suzanne Dufresne in Winnipeg, and Max Miller in New York City. The Current's intern is Bethlehem Mariam. The Current's writer is Peter Mitton. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso and our digital producer is Padraig Moran. Our documentary editor is Joan Webber. Transcriptions are provided by Rasha Shehata and Nikhil Sharma. Our technical producer is Gary Francis. Our senior producers are Willow Smith in Toronto and Cathy Simon in Vancouver. The acting executive producer of The Current is Alison Broddle. And we'd like to welcome the newest member of the Current family! Oscar Mitton was born yesterday to the Current's writer Peter Mitton and his wife Christina. Congratulations to them!

GF: That is our program for today. Stay tuned to Radio 1 for Q. Tom Power is going to be talking to Canadian afterwaactor Joshua Jackson who's starring in his first role on Broadway in Children of a Lesser God. So earlier we heard how Beatboxing is being used to unlock the secrets of the brain and as a tool for speech therapy. Beatboxing may sound like a very special skill but world champion beatboxer Kaila Mullady says if you have lips, teeth and lungs you can do it. So we're going to give her the last word today with a quick lesson in the art of vocal percussion. I'm Gillian Findlay. Thanks so much for listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

[Beatboxing sounds]

KAILA MULLADY: What's up guys. This is Kaila Mullady and I'm a drop beat for you.

[Beatboxing sounds]

KAILA MULLADY: So I'm about to show you the quick version of how to beatbox. So when I break down a beat like this:.

[Beatboxing sounds]

KAILA MULLADY: Really all I'm doing is three letters and those three letters are 'p', 't' and 'k'. So when we look at the first letter P Well we're emulating as beatboxers is the bass drum. So say pumpkin. Now notice when we say pumpkin we don't fold our lips and we don't go 'pumpkin' because we actually lose all our power that way. So the same way that we create that 'p', we put our lips a little bit more together and put some pressure behind it to get that bass drum sound.

[beatbocing sound]

KAILA MULLADY: The second sound is the high hats so those high sounds are letter 'T' and 'TS' tsss. So it's kind of like a snake right. Tocco. tete tssss.

[Beatboxing sounds]

KAILA MULLADY: The last one we're going to do is a letter 'k'. So the same way that we say cake. It's your tongue in the middle of the roof of your mouth that creates a k k k sound. So once you do that and you practice it that's when you get that powerful k k sound.

[Beatboxing sounds]

KAILA MULLADY: Now we got the three sounds down. Once we put them together, the pattern will sound like this: the first one goes p t k.pe, te, ke. Awsome.

[Beatboxing Sounds] [/sc]

[Music: Theme]

Friday April 13, 2018 Full Episode Transcript

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