Here's the same couplet presented in tabular form, with the off-beat positions (nominally eighth notes in the transcription I've assumed) labelled with '+': + As usual, it's the syllable onset - the place where the amplitude is rising most rapidly, known to generations of phoneticians as the ' P Center' - that aligns with a given metrical 'beat'. The basic pattern of the musical meter is the usual binary hierarchy - to get the 16 units, the line is subdivided into 2, subdivided into 4, subdivided into 8, subdivided into 16.Ībove, I've used a couple of Audacity label tracks for the musical meter and for the alignment of the words with the metrical line divided into 8 time-units, which I've notated as 1 through 4 and then 1 through 4 again. What matters to the analysis is that if we track this metrical pattern through the times when Melle Mel is rapping, we find that he subdivides it into (a maximum of) 16 minimal time units, as in this couplet from the first verse:

Your browser does not support the audio element. (I've taken it to represent two bars of 4/4 time, though Jonathan Mayhew in the comments suggests that a more standard analysis would be transcribe it as one bar.) The metrical pattern that lines up with a line of the verse lasts about 2.4 seconds - one period of that pattern is shown below. The background has a clear and steady beat.

Let's look at a piece from the classical period, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's 1982 'The Message': This alignment is not automatic or always obvious - it has artistically-relevant degrees of freedom beyond those available in most other genres of text setting.įor those whose appraisal of Bradley's book was (interpreting freely) 'not enough vampires and car chases', this will probably make things worse - you have been warned. The lines' scansion depends not only on the syllable sequence and on where the performer puts phrasal stresses, but also on the alignment of the syllables with the musical meter. This exercise will clarify why transcriptions of the lyrics, even with bold-face indications of stress, are missing an important dimension. One of the advantages of the weblog format is the combination of text, images, and audio or video clips, so for this morning's Breakfast Experiment™ I decided to present a small exploration of the 'poetics of hip hop' in a multimedia - and somewhat quantitative - framework. There are good reasons that this is more true for the works of Melle Mel or Jay Z than for Elizabeth Barrett Browning or W.H. One student observed that in pieces he knows, the rhythm is there in the written form - but the lyrics for pieces that he doesn't know seem flat and lifeless in comparison. In my discussion group yesterday afternoon, several participants complained that some important things about the 'poetics' of rap are lost in a purely textual presentation of the lyrics. This year's Penn Reading Project book is Adam Bradley's Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop.

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