The Music Maker: Darren Foreman, aka Beardyman, on how to produce an album in an hour

The songs are composed on stage in real-time, using a contraption Foreman calls the Beardytron. The titles are taken from suggestions supplied by the audience members in writing beforehand, and the songs take whichever form seems most appropriate to him at the time. Could be an Adele-style ballad. Could be a trip-hop dirge. Could be a four-to-the-floor techno banger.

“Some of the suggestions are rubbish, so I read them out at the start and everyone mocks them and that's fun,” he explains. “Then I use the good suggestions, the ones that sound like proper song titles, and I make the songs that they sound like … It kind of sounds like a comedy show and I guess much of it is really funny. But the idea is that I make really good songs, so it's a good album.”

The only pointers he gives are: no puns, nothing lewd or scatological and no public hate figures. Otherwise anything goes, and the more metaphorical and poetic the better. At one of last year's shows he turned the song title suggestion Tickle The Frog into a 1970s-style Peter Gabriel art rock number.

“It's only when the crowd are particularly un-inventive that you have a problem,” he says. “Like on a Sunday night when they're all really hungover. Or on a Saturday night when they're all really pissed.”

Or when they're from Cardiff.

“Weirdly there are very strong regional variations, often city by city. I think socio-economic grouping plays the largest part but I think there are some places that are just … I did a show in Cardiff and it was just like the wrongest of the wrong. We had rape, anal sex, s***, paedophilia. It was like I'd stumbled onto the wrong part of the internet. And it was across the board. There were maybe 10 usable ones. So I came out and just started yelling at them, saying 'What is the matter with you?'”

Another constant is the glimpse the written suggestions give into the mind of their authors. Be warned, prospective Beardyman attendees: you will be judged.

“Sometimes people don't think what they're writing and it becomes this stream of consciousness,” says Foreman. “Sometimes the three titles they write down are like a little, sad, short story about what's going on in their lives: Kids Are Annoying, No Money, Divorce. Things like that. My tour manager goes through them before the show and sometimes he's just laughing and laughing.”

Foreman, however, doesn't see any of them until he's on stage. That would spoil the fun. His as much as anyone else's.

Now 34, London-born Foreman was schooled in drum and bass as a teenager and in his mid-20s he was twice UK beatbox champion, a competitive discipline which uses vocal percussion to mimic the drum sounds of hip-hop. At its best, it's almost impossible to tell apart from the real thing.

Adding another element into the mix, his childhood was soundtracked by his parents' love of acts from the 1940s and 1950s such as Spike Jones, who performed satirical versions of popular songs.

“My parents used to play us stuff that I was never quite clear if it was music or comedy, stuff that bridged that continuum,” he says.

Another family favourite was impressionist and musician Mel Blanc, best known as the voice of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck from the Looney Tunes cartoons.

“It was really insane, like a laugh-a-second. You never knew what was coming next. He had this giant rack of cowbells, guns, hooters. There were guys coming on doing gargling solos and scat singing. It was the dumbest s*** you've ever heard, but also really amazing.”

So does he see himself as part of that same tradition, a novelty act with roots in music hall, albeit one with a digital, 21st century face?

“Not really. I think what I do is more considered.”

Foreman's musical and compositional skills aren't in doubt, but what the beat-boxing in particular taught him as well was how to improvise, a crucial step on the way to developing his One Album Per Hour show.

“I wasn't raised on hip-hop, but once I started taking beat-boxing seriously, a decade ago, I suddenly got immersed in this world where spontaneity was rewarded,” he says. “In Western music, spontaneity tended to be kept strictly to the composer's piano. That always struck me as odd.”

At beat-boxing “battles”, on the other hand, competitors lived on their wits, as did the free-styling MCs who often accompanied them. The point wasn't lost on Foreman. Never one for rehearsing much – “I've never found it rewarding” – he instead took his skills into the world of improvisation, indulging his preference for seat-of-the-pants performance by using his beat-boxing and a battery of musical gizmos to build up sounds using live loops. He would perform in clubs, at raves, on festival stages (Glastonbury, Reading, Bestival) and, increasingly, in front of comedy audiences. Today his “guiding ethic” is “improvisation over and above everything else”.

Helping him out is the Beardytron – or, to give it its full name, the Beardytron_5000MkIV. It's basically a keyboard, a couple of other bits of musical hardware and five iPads, and with it Foreman can record himself or others, loop those recordings, add effects in real-time and throw in other pre-set sounds as and when he feels like it. He's a little like a DJ but without the box of records. All he needs is what comes out of his head via his mouth, and the sonic capabilities of his musical spaceship.

The Beardytron uses proprietary software Foreman has designed himself – along with musician and comedian, he has "inventor" on his CV – and its relative compactness disguises some pretty fearsome computing power. Put simply, it punches above its weight. Put less simply: “If there was, like, a one-to-one relationship between functionality and interface doo-hickey then it would be massive. Huge. But there's a lot of macro-isation, if you will … I find lots of happy accidents when I use it, because you can never quite predict what it's going to do.”

A bit like the TARDIS? “A little bit.”

So on his gravestone will it say musician, inventor or comedian? “I won't have a gravestone. I want to be cremated. Gravestones are creepy.”

On the Blue Plaque that goes on his house, then. The one that says Here Lived Beardyman … “I don't think I'm going to deserve a Blue Plaque. Have you noticed I'm evading your question?”

But behind the cocky persona, the japes and the crowd-pleasing improvisation lies a questing and restless intelligence. In Beardyman And The Mimics, a documentary for BBC Radio 4, Foreman delved into the world of animal mimicry in the company of twitcher and musician Bill Oddie. He has a dedicated YouTube channel with 165,000 subscribers on which he covers a cornucopia of subjects. And in 2013 he gave a TED talk in California titled The Polyphonic M in which he mimics everything from a drum machine to a crying baby and outlines his “mission” to continue to expand his “repertoire of noises”. To date it has racked up nearly two millions views.

Accordingly, this is the last year that Fringe-goers will be able to see him perform One Album Per Hour. There's a new project in the offing, an eight-piece band, light on comedy and geared more towards improvisational music. And, returning to the world of beat-boxing, he has co-opted some of the scene's brightest talents to add their voices to it. Theirs is “a rare talent” he says, and one he wants to utilise.

“A lot of MCs battle each other, lowering each other's self-esteem through insults, and that's the aim of the game. But in comedic improvisation, which is in the main the preserve of the white middle classes, they're not trading insults, they're being silly and playing, and that's very freeing. So when I've met MCs who look at improvisation as a means to play and have fun, rather than just deride each other's clothing, I have to work with those people.”

Catch him while you can, Edinburgh. But be careful what you write.

Beardyman: One Album Per Hour is at the Pleasance Grand from August 18 to 24. He and his Dream team will also appear on the opening day of the Belladrum Tartan Heart Festival near Beauly, near Inverness, on Thursday August 4, as main support to The Darkness