Flowprints: A revised method for visualising flow in rap

ABSTRACT

With scholarship on the musical dimensions of rap still in its infancy, there are still analytical tools that need to be developed and refined. We have a lot of data: the timing and articulation of hundreds of songs has been transcribed, thanks to a few very dedicated scholars. This data, however, exists in lengthy, largely neglected spreadsheets. By tracking recent developments in flow visualisation and utilising insights from each in a new approach, the paper contributes a working system for visualising flow aimed at nuance, automation, integration with existing corpuses, and accessibility for a lay audience.

KEYWORDS:

• Flowprints
• rap
• hip-hop
• flow
• visualisation

Acknowledgements

This work would not have been possible without the generous guidance and oversight of Associate Professor Marcelle Freiman (Macquarie University), Professor Antonina Harbus (Macquarie University), Professor Alexander Bergs (Osnabrück University), as well as invaluable input from the editor and blind reviewers for this issue.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Jeremy Page http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4279-4692

Notes

1 The best of these include Tricia Rose's Black Noise (1994), Nelson George’s Hip Hop America (1998) and Jeff Chang's Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation (2005). See Chang, 2005; George, 2005; Rose, 1994)

2 One of the many driving motivations for myself and others to explore the analysis of rap is an effort to redress scholarly neglect that has, at least in part, been due to the systematic exclusion of black art forms and black voices from literary canons. Consequently, the application of any tools that were developed entirely in isolation from such voices may lead to a white-washing of the art; the precise opposite of what any considered approach to rap should strive to achieve.

3 In some instances, this is rather deliberate, as in Alexs’ Pate's In the Heart of the Beat: The Poetry of Rap (2009), in which Pate ‘want[s] to liberate the poetry of rap … from the stereotyped expectations of their function as “songs”’ [original emphasis]. See (Pate, 2009)

4 Kyle Adams, ‘The Musical Analysis of Hip-Hop’, in (The Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop, 2015)

5 Of course, lyrically rap contains progressions in narrative, rhyme structure and so forth, but these occur over cyclical music production, so there is an asymmetry between the nature of the vocals and the nature of the beat.

6 See David Caldwell, ‘Making Many Meanings in Popular Rap Music’, in (Mahboob & Knight, 2010); ‘Making Meter Mean: Identity and Affiliation in the Rap Music of Kanye West’, in (Caldwell & Zappavigna, 2011; Martin & Bednarek, 2010)

7 (Condit-Schultz, 2017b)

8 (Ohriner, 2017)

9 To my knowledge, the most ambitious transcription and analysis of flow to date has been taken up by Condit-Schultz in his dissertation MCFlow: A Digital Corpus of Rap Flow (2016), the major findings of which have been published in Empirical Musicology Review. Condit-Schultz has manually transcribed a corpus of 124 popular rap songs, sampled from different eras in the history of rap, based on total sales. See (Condit-Schultz, 2017b)

10 (Condit-Schultz, 2017a)

11 Lamar (2017). Digital.

12 I write almost any rap verse because there would be rare instances in which an alternative time signature combined with unusual instrumentation make may my method ineffective, though I would be interested to find such instances in order to tweak the methodology further.

13 (Bradley, 2009)

14 I should note that Alexs Pate does this quite deliberately, with the intention of ‘liberating’ the poetry from the musical aspect of rap. See (Pate, 2009)

15 See Kyle Adams, ‘The Musical Analysis of Hip-Hop’, in (The Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop, 2015)

16 (Krims, 2000)

17 For reasons of space here I limit the transcription to two bars.

18 (Ohriner, 2017)

19 Et al.

20 Lamar (2017). Digital.

21 At present, in instances where more than one phone occurs in a particular segment (here the segments are less than one-tenth of a second), the first phone is transcribed, along with the syllable nucleus. See Appendix for an outline of this difficulty and potential solutions.

22 (Nagamine et al., 2015). Note that Nagamine (et al.) only employ ten discrete colours in their colour mapping, where I have utilised 44 different colours on a complete spectrum. Accordingly, my colour mapping is inspired by, but not precisely in line with this research. A closer correlation and further revisions of the colour mapping will be necessary for flowprints to capture sound in a way that is both intuitive and accurate to the empirical relationships between sounds.

23 (Condit-Schultz, 2017a)

24 (Condit-Schultz, 2016)

25 (Jay, 2011)

26 Drake, Nothing Was the Same (Los Angeles: Cash Money Records, 2013). Digital

27 Drake, Take Care (Los Angeles: Cash Money Records, 2011). Digital

28 Drake, Nothing Was the Same (Los Angeles: Cash Money Records, 2013). Digital

29 (Condit-Schultz, 2016)

30 Eminem, The Marshall Mathers LP (Los Angeles: Interscope Records, 2000). Digital.

31 2Pac, Me Against the World (San Francisco: Interscope Records, 1994). Digital.

32 (Condit-Schultz, 2016)