The concept of an Open Mic Night is simple: gather a bunch of performers together, give them a microphone, sit back and see what happens. 

The Student Union Board’s (SUB) Open Mic Night is held biweekly for student performers, old and new, to hone and debut their talents. 

The Open Mic Night on Tuesday night featured a plethora of student performers, including singers, rappers, comics and a beatboxer.

Open Mic Night is an event open to students who have never set foot on stage before. Chasey Sedam, freshman in civil engineering, wowed the audience with her stand-up routine. A longtime fan of comedy, this was her first time ever performing. Her friends in her residence hall encouraged her to try her hand at it.

“I was like, ‘Guys, watch this, I’m gonna go do it,’ and so that’s exactly what I did,” Sedam said. 

Despite it being her first performance ever, Sedam seemed unnerved and had the crowd rolling throughout her entire 10-minute set. She made fun of her own name and even came up with material on the spot, calling on the crowd to give her random prompts.

Sedam said she initially started going to stand-up comedy shows as a way to get herself out there and get involved as a freshman. 

“I wanted to go because I was working on making friends throughout the campus, so I wanted to try to get involved and just go and watch things,” Sedam said. “I was like, ‘Man, I could do something like that.’ Literally, like, every idea that pops in my head is hilarious. I make myself laugh; I can make everyone else laugh.”

Seasoned performers are frequent at the Open Mic Night as a way to test out new material and let off steam. Lauren Roberts, senior in industrial design, gave a melodramatic performance where she played the piano and sang two cover songs. While she doesn’t perform solo very often, she is also one half of the a cappella duo Purple Vocal with beatboxer Jim Wang, who also performed.

“I started going [to Open Mic Night] sophomore year,” Roberts said. “I used to go just to meet people to do jam sessions with, and then now that I do stuff with [Wang], we just go to perform and see other people do stuff. It’s kind of a little community, which is cool.” 

Roberts and Wang met each other at an Open Mic Night last year and have been making music together as Purple Vocal for the past eight months.

“There tends to be a lot of regular people that come and perform, so we all support each other and get to know each other based on whatever we’re singing,” Roberts said.

Wang, junior in philosophy, gave a bass-heavy vocal percussion performance that sounded borderline inhuman. After free-styling a few tracks, he brought Roberts back onstage to sing while they performed a medley of pop songs together. 

Wang said he’s been beatboxing for nine years. While in a general army training program in China, he met a beatboxer and immediately fell in love with the art.

Wang said he enjoys the Open Mic Night environment because it gives him the opportunity to share something out-of-the-box, such as beatboxing, with a big group of people.

“Open Mic Night has a really good environment to [try] some experimental stuff,” Wang said. “Something brand new, people have never heard of it.” 

Wang also said he enjoys getting to see the crowd’s reactions to what he and Roberts can do.

“[Open Mic Night] is a very good environment since beatboxing plus a cappella group [is] a super rare, underrated form of music,” Wang said. “We just want to put it out there.”