A Corpus for Rap Music Analysis

Over the course of his writing, Leonard B. Meyer distinguished between two kinds of music analysis: style analysis, which identifies the “rules of the game” operating in a collection of music, and critical analysis, which seeks to explain the choices of artists by identifying the range of possibilities they confront at each moment and interpreting the path they take. This chapter prepares for the critical analysis of flow in rap music by constructing a corpus of rap verses, taking care to document and maintain rap’s chronological, geographical, and stylistic diversity. The chapter also describes how primary constituents of flow (text, rhythm, and phrase) are digitally represented in the corpus.