Rap lyrics are a popular and understudied domain of human culture. In particular, improvised rap lyrics provide a unique window into the cognitive and linguistic constraints of creative language production. Although the vast majority of rap lyrics are written (premeditated), improvising lyrics has long been a core element of hip-hop culture. Very few efforts have investigated the neural underpinnings of improvised rap, and none so far have focused on the language output itself. This project compares phonemic, rhyme, and semantic features of written and improvised rap lyrics from 7 expert rappers in order to uncover related phonological structures. Here, I demonstrate that the phonemes of these two modes of production seem to be drawn from different distributions. In addition, across various metrics, improvised lyrics from these experts display smaller phonological structures and less variation than written lyrics from those same artists, all while consistently exhibiting large rhyming patterns (3+ syllable).

What’s Different About Improvised Rap?

How many rhymes are possible in English? How much alliteration or assonance? This paper explores the space of common phonologically driven poetic devices. I investigate instances of these poetic devices across unique words in the dictionary, assuming perfect matching in relevant corresponding elements of word pairs. Documenting the frequencies of poetic device matches across words provides a baseline for understanding the diversity and use of these forms in the wild. It also allows us to describe the distribution of words across these patterns within each poetic device. We show that certain devices, such as alliteration and stress, support a relatively small number of unique phonological patterns, providing more consolidated and predictable resources than other devices. Forms like masculine and feminine rhyme, assonance, and consonance display relatively more sound patterns respectively, and unique words are distributed across them differently. These results are discussed in terms of their poetic and cognitive implications.

Jordan A Ackerman

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