I’m continuing to gather materials for my upcoming ISMIR 2016 presentation on Why Hip-Hop Is Interesting. One of my big themes is the melodic content of rap. Emcees are deliberate in their use of pitch, whether they’re singing or rapping or some combination of the two. In the post, I’ll analyze segments of three great emcees’ flow. I made the graphics by loading acapella tracks into Melodyne, and then added the lyric annotations by hand using Omnigraffle. The selection of these tracks represents the intersection of “songs that I like” and “acapellas that are available to me.”
Eric B and Rakim – “Follow The Leader”
Emcee: Rakim Allah
Rakim Allah stands out among eighties rappers for the complexity and subtlety of his flow. Here’s an excerpt from verse one:
Hip-hop verses usually bob gently around a single central pitch, jumping up or down to emphasize certain syllables. It’s common to end phrases with a descending figure. We do the same thing in common speech to indicate a period at the end of a sentence. To indicate a question mark, we end the sentence by rising in pitch. We also? Do the rising pitch thing? When we uptalk? Like valley girls? Rakim’s phrases in “Follow The Leader” gradually rise in pitch, not at the end but all the way through. The effect isn’t questioning or uncertainty, but rather steadily building intensity.
Later in verse one there’s a similar ascending line:
Both of these phrases end with a fall of a third or so, which is why Rakim sounds declarative and confident rather than doubtful.
The phrase that gives “Follow The Leader” its name is a sample of an earlier Eric B and Rakim song, “I Know You Got Soul.” Eric B scratches it into the choruses, but also neatly drops it into the middle of verse two:
Rakim is mostly famous for his dense internal rhymes and his flat, no-nonsense tone. I wouldn’t have thought of him as a melodist until I saw his voice on the screen. Now that I’m conscious of it, I hear how his subtle use of pitch contour adds color to his flow.
Fugees – “Fu-Gee-La [Refugee Camp Remix]”
Emcee: Lauryn Hill
Lauryn’s verses use a singsong cadence stuffed to bursting with multisyllable rhymes and witty imagery. This line has a gentle downward slope, with occasional leaps down by a sixth or more. The sudden pitch change puts emphasis on those syllables like a spotlight. 
All four of the emphasized syllables rhyme with “me.” There are additional ri sounds in “Atari” and “Hari-kari” that don’t have the big pitch drop, maybe because they’re in the middle of a rapid flow of syllables, rather than the end of mini-phrase.
OutKast – “B.O.B.”
Emcee: Andre 3000
These few lines are just a tiny slice of the firehose-like stream of syllables in Dre’s verse. His melody twists and turns and jumps unpredictably, more like a bebop saxophone solo than a composed melody. It’s all within a narrow pitch range, but elsewhere both Dre and Big Boi switch into a singsong feel with big interval jumps on every syllable. Their virtuoso style is a challenge to replicate at any tempo, and listening to them on a track this fast is like listening to Coltrane blow over “Countdown.”
The Music Information Retrieval field has been making big strides in automated analysis of melodies and harmonies across big collections of songs. So far, though, most of this work has focused on music that sticks to the piano-key pitches. I would love to see some corpus analysis of rap melodies. Putting together the analyses by hand is slow and labor-intensive. My dream is to be able to type in the name of any track and see its annotated pitch contours, the way I can currently see its lyrics and samples. What do you say, MIR community?
would love to see the melodyne trick with some regular spoken words. I’m not sure that melodic content in rap is that much different from melodic content in regular speaking — we don’t speak in mono pitches!
It’s true that we use pitch contour in our speech all the time. It’s an empirical question as to how different the pitch content of rap is from the pitch content of regular speech. I would guess that rappers use a wider variety of pitch contour and that they deploy melody more heavily, because rapping is a heightened vocal practice, more like singing from an emotional standpoint. I’d certainly be interested to see someone study this on a large scale.