Rap Science
Hip-hop music, and its definitive rapped vocals, took the world by storm in the 1980s and 1990s and continues to be a major force in popular music. However, music theoretic discussion of rap itself has been few an far between: how emcees create interesting musical experiences with their rap flow is still not well understood. Fortunately, a few pioneering musicologists and music theorists have slowly begun to study flow—in particular, my interest in studying rap flow was peaked when I first read Kyle Adams' seminal article on rap "On the Metrical Techniques of Flow in Rap Music". For my doctoral dissertation, I sought to put this work on a more empirical footing by conducting a computational study of a large body of rap. I created a digital corpus of rap transcriptions that I call the Musical Corpus of Flow, or MCFlow. Using this corpus I was able to study the stylistic "norms" or rap, as well as some historical trends in inter-emcee variation—this work culminated in a published article in the Empirical Musicology Review.
I've also a website dedicated to rap music theory and science: rapscience.net. At rapscience.net you can find the MCFlow dataset itself, as well as an interactive GUI which allows you to visualize any song in my corpus as a "flow diagram."
