2Īn emcee like MC Serch, writing verses without first hearing the beat, is confident that an appropriate beat will emerge because of the invariants of metric structure in rap music. Still others begin writing by improvising through 'scat singing,' finding an appealing rhythmic pattern and subsequently searching for words with suitable rhythms (p. It's impossible to do the same style on every beat, I feel (p. I like to listen to the beat, get a nice groove for it, and see where the beat takes you. Other emcees want their flows to align with the material of the beat. I write a rhythm and a flow, and then I wait for the right beat that matches that rhythm and flow. Consider the practice of MC Serch of 3 rd Bass as an example:

Some emcees come to the beat with pre-composed lyrics, ranging in length from phrases to entire verses, and coerce the rhythms of those words to the meter of the beat. As Paul Edwards (2009) documents in his extensive interviews with emcees, a host of relationships between the flow and the beat are possible. THIS article uses methods of corpus studies to address questions of creative practice in rap music, specifically how the material of the rapping voice-what emcees, hip-hop heads, and scholars call 'the flow'-relates to the material of the previously recorded instrumental tracks collectively known as the beat. Submitted 2015 July 15 accepted 2015 December 15.

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. 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. 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. 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). This article extends this scholarship by addressing a new genre (rap music) and a new parameter of focus (rhythm). ABSTRACT: Recent years have seen the rise of musical corpus studies, primarily detailing harmonic tendencies of tonal music.

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