Recent years have seen the rise of musical corpus studies, primarily detailing harmonic tendencies of tonal music. This article extends this scholarship by addressing a new genre (rap music) and a new parameter of focus (rhythm). More specifically, I use corpus methods to investigate the relation between metric ambivalence in the instrumental parts of a rap track (i.e., the beat) and an emcee's rap delivery (i.e., the flow). Unlike virtually every other rap track, the instrumental tracks of Outkast's "Mainstream" (1996) simultaneously afford hearing both a four-beat and a three-beat metric cycle. Because three-beat durations between rhymes, phrase endings, and reiterated rhythmic patterns are rare in rap music, an abundance of them within a verse of "Mainstream" suggests that an emcee highlights the three-beat cycle, especially if that emcee is not prone to such durations more generally. Through the construction of three corpora, one representative of the genre as a whole, and two that are artist specific, I show how the emcee T-Mo Goodie's expressive practice highlights the rare three-beat affordances of the track.

[1] The last three decades have seen a growing interest in the slight beat-to-beat changes in duration that pervade performances of tonal music. Many current approaches originating in the work of music psychologists interpret durational variability as the means by which performers convey both segment boundaries and hierarchical relationships between segments. But these approaches depend on a one-way mapping from a single grouping-structural analysis onto performed ABSTRACT: Theories of expressive timing in the performance of tonal music emphasize the role of grouping structure, whereby performers are understood to communicate the ends of groups through group-final lengthening (GFL). But this approach depends on a one-way mapping from a single grouping-structural analysis onto performed durations, denying a role for interpretive difference on the part of performers and analysts. Drawing on contour theory, this article reverses this mapping by presenting a method for recovering the hierarchical grouping structure of a performed phrase that is sensitive to the constraints of temporal perception. Groups whose durational contour segments reduce to a contour adjacency series of <+> or <-,+> are understood to be GFL-reflective. By observing which levels of time-span organization are GFL-reflective among different performances of the same phrase, unique construals of grouping structure can be attributed to different renditions.The article employs this method in order to examine different approaches to pacing in performances of two of Chopin's mazurkas. The pieces in question present eight-measure themes in which the salience of different levels of grouping structure contrast. Through duration decisions, performers can accentuate, amend, or bypass these suggestions of contrast in pacing. By presenting an analytical method that recognizes the creative power of performance to interact with a grouping structure implied by a score, I hope to reshape the relationship between performers and analysts as a dialog about the possible structural descriptions a piece can support. Received October 20111 of 16 durations, a mapping at odds with the possibilities for interpretive difference that are increasingly acknowledged in music analysis (Cook 1999).[2] In this article, after expositing how performers can suggest novel descriptions of grouping structure by lengthening group-final events (Sections I and II), I will introduce a method grounded in contour theory for determining the relative salience of hierarchically nested groups in a particular recorded performance (Section III). I will then argue that shifts in the level of grouping structure presented as most salient affect the perceived pacing of a piece (Section IV). In later analyses, I will show how performers can address contrasts in pacing, or trajectories in pacing, latent in two of Chopin's mazurkas (Section V). By introducing an analytical method that begins with the particularities of a phrase as it is performed, I hope to demonstrate one way in which performance can aff...

After twenty years of published analyses on rap lyrics and flow, a divide between music-oriented and literature-oriented writing remains. It is only slightly hyperbolic to suggest that the former analyzes rap music as music without text while the latter analyzes it as text without music. This article begins bridging that divide by relating details of Kendrick Lamar’s rhythmic delivery to the meaning of his lyrics, focusing on the second verse of “Momma” from To Pimp a Butterfly (2015). In particular, I present methods for measuring and visualizing the alignment of syllable onsets (i.e., the flow) with events in the accompanying instrumental streams (i.e., the beat). Subsequently, in examining three lines of the verse, I document an analogy between flow-beat alignment and topics of vitality, moral rightness, and knowledge in the lyrics. In demonstrating one way in which rhythmic delivery can affirm the expressive meaning of lyrics, I hope to provide tools that enable hip hop scholars interested in rhythm, rhyme, and meaning to sometimes talk to each other rather than past each other.

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