Hip-hop rhymes reiterate phonological typology

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze a database of rhymes from African-American English hip-hop. The analysis shows that rappers possess detailed implicit knowledge about speech sounds that is largely irrelevant to the sound pattern of their particular language, but has been argued to play a role in constraining possible sound systems across all human languages. We argue that rhyme data are related to phonological typology because many phonological patterns involve the neutralization of contrasts in contexts where they are less perceptible, and rhyme involves implicit judgments of perceptual similarity between sounds. The general finding is that sounds are more likely to mismatch in a rhyme in those contexts where the contrast between the sounds is more likely to neutralize cross-linguistically, even though the contrasts studied here do not neutralize in these contexts in English. The results contribute to the evidence for detailed implicit phonetic knowledge and bear on the issue of synchronic explanation in linguistic theory.

Style and Flow: A Commentary on Duinker & Martin

“…Old-school rap, from a period roughly up to the late 1980s, tends to be fairly rhythmically regular: linguistic groups tend to be of roughly equal length and aligned to similar positions in metrical structure. This can be seen in transcriptions of a 1984 Curtis Blow song (Adams, 2009) or excerpts from a 1986 Run DMC song (Katz, 2015), for instance. Rhymes in these songs also tend to be at the ends of linguistic groups; given this tendency and the tendency of groups to be regular with respect to meter, the location of rhymes is fairly predictable within this time period.…”

“…Later music begins to relax all of these constraints on alignment, grouping, and rhyme placement: see, for instance, Walser's (1995) analysis of Chuck D.'s 1988 performance on 'Fight the Power', Pihel's (1996) partial transcription of a Big L piece from the early 1990s, and Horn's (2010) account of rhyme placement in the 1990s recordings of Snoop Dogg. By the time of the music sampled by Katz (2008Katz ( , 2015, from 1993 to 2007, there is a high level of freedom with regard to the length of linguistic groups, their alignment to metrical structure, and the placement of rhymes within grouping or metrical structure. I chose that sample based on perceived complexity and unpredictability of rhymes, and the paper gives several illustrations of complex alignment.…”

“…In English, rhyme domains can be smaller (flavor -behavior) or larger (ruin -flew in) than a word. The question of what 'counts' as a rhyme in hip-hop is a vexed and possibly intractable one (see Katz, 2015;Condit-Schultz, 2016a;and Ohriner, 2016b for three different views on the issue); for this exercise, I just used my intuition. Because we're mainly concerned with comparisons between songs, rather than absolute levels of rhyme or rhythmic complexity, this choice seems appropriate to me.…”

“…Final indicates whether the rhyme in question is the last stressed syllable of the last group contained in a measure; because the canonical placement of a rhyme is (roughly) final in a measure, this is an indication of how predictable rhyme placement is. Furthermore, because non-final rhymes often unfold separately from concurrent final rhymes (see Katz, 2015 for illustrations), this measure will tend to capture cases where there is more than one rhyme scheme occurring at once. Parallel indicates whether or not the rhyming pair in question occupies positions that were part of a rhyme in the preceding 2 measures; it is an index of how repetitive rhyme schemes are in a song.…”

“…CORPUS-BASED methods in the study of hip-hop have proliferated over the past 10 to 15 years (Kawahara, 2007;Katz, 2008Katz, , 2015Hirjee & Brown, 2010;Horn, 2010); culminating in two hip-hop corpus studies being published in the same issue of this journal in 2016 (Condit-Schultz, 2016a;Ohriner, 2016a) along with associated commentaries (Gran, 2016;Condit-Schultz, 2016b;Ohriner, 2016b). A third study now joins them: Duinker & Martin's (2017) excellent examination of how musical, vocal, and production parameters factor into judgments of hip-hop 'style' or 'sound'.…”