hey, welcome to 12tone! how do rappers use
pitch? on the surface, it seems like kind
of a silly question.
I mean, they don't, right?
that's the biggest difference between rapping
and singing.
but, well, that's not quite true.
I mean, sure, rap may not always use precise,
intentional pitches, but any human vocalization
is gonna have some fundamental frequency,
and given how clever rappers can be with how
they use their voice, it'd be more surprising
if they didn't do at least something with
their inflection.
so how does it work?
(tick, tick, tick, tick, tock)
this video is sponsored by CuriosityStream!
I should start by acknowledging that this
is a pretty under-researched area.
hip-hop doesn't get anywhere near the respect
it deserves from music academia, especially
music theory.
that's not to say this is a complete mystery:
actual rappers spend a lot of time thinking
about these sort of things and I don't want
to understate the value of practitioner expertise,
but scholarly research serves a different
purpose, and on that front, music theory is
really dropping the ball.
if you want to know why that is you can watch
my last video, but the upshot of all this
is that most of the contents of this video
are gonna be based on a single chapter in
the PhD thesis of Dr. Robert Komaniecki, submitted
in 2019, with a few of my own observations
thrown in for good measure.
hopefully Dr. Komaniecki's work inspires more
music theorists to seriously engage with hip-hop
in the future, but for now I'm working with
what I've got.
first, though, we've got to address the elephant
in the room: pitches in rap are often imprecise,
but if we want to analyze them we need some
way to show what they're doing, so for this
video I'm gonna be adopting Dr. Komaniecki's
approach of using the lines of the staff to
represent pitch zones instead of precise notes.
I'll use the middle line to represent a rapper's
normal register, and then if they go noticeably
up or down I'll move onto the other lines,
so if I write this, that doesn't mean it's
B and D, or even that it's a minor 3rd. it
just means the second note is higher than
the first.
got it? great.
in his thesis, Dr. Komaniecki describes five
main ways rappers manipulate the pitch of
their voice for expressive effect, organized
from most speech-like to most singing-like.
in doing so, he cites a bunch of different
artists, which is a bunch of different potential
copyright claims for this video if I use his
examples, so instead I decided to challenge
myself to find all five techniques in clipping.'s
Splendor And Misery, because it's an amazing
album and I wanted an excuse to talk about
it.
seriously, if you haven't heard it, I really
recommend looking it up.
after you finish watching this video, of course.
the first technique, and perhaps the most
obvious, is rhyme strengthening, where syllables
that rhyme are placed in a different pitch
zone from the rest of the line in order to
draw attention to them, like in this clip
from Air 'Em Out: (rats, decided it was time
to hit the surface.
cats, sleepin' on it, write 'em off like cursive)
where Daveed Diggs highlights the rhyme between
"rats" and "cats" by delivering them at a
higher pitch.
that's the obvious one, anyway, but he also
does a subtler thing at the end, doing the
same little turnaround on "surface" and "cursive"
to tie those together too.
the line gives each rhyme its own melodic
motif to help keep everything organized.
this is especially useful because hip-hop
often has much more complex rhyme schemes
than other forms of pop music, full of internal
rhymes, slant rhymes, and so on, so using
pitch to emphasize rhymed syllables helps
guide the listener through those structures.
like, earlier in Air 'Em Out we hear this
(your war is like a board game, where it come
from, I'm already bored claiming your game,
bewm go the gun) and while a surface-level
reading of the lyrics would easily identify
the end-rhyme between "from" and "gun", Diggs's
use of pitch reveals a secondary rhyme running
through "war", "board", "bored", and "your",
spaced unevenly throughout the phrase, that
wouldn't be immediately obvious otherwise.
he's doing something extra clever, and the
melodic contour helps make sure you notice.
and I want to pull up one more example, from
Interlude 01: (some if you want it but it
aint no fun, turn your whole bridge into route
101) again, we have a higher pitch to separate
out all the syllables that rhyme with "fun",
but if you listen closely, you'll notice that
"bridge" also appears in that same pitch zone.
why?
well, in his thesis, Dr. Komaniecki briefly
mentions that, in this sort of analysis, we
can sometimes think of rhyme non-literally.
in this case, Diggs isn't highlighting words
that sound the same, he's highlighting a clever
bit of wordplay.
he's talking about the bridge of a spaceship,
which he then compares to the bridges on a
famously crowded highway like route 101 in
Los Angeles.
moving it into the rhyming pitch zone tells
you it's connected even if it's not actually
a rhyme.
I should note, though, that for many rappers,
this probably isn't a conscious decision.
it's a natural part of human speech: we don't
talk in monotone, and when we recite poetry
we tend to place rhymed syllables in the same
pitch zone. if I say there are strange things
done in the midnight sun by the men who moil
for gold, you probably heard me going up on
"done" and "sun", and down on "gold" to set
up the end rhyme with the next line.
some rappers certainly use this actively,
and I wouldn't be surprised if Diggs was one
of them, but it's also worth keeping in mind
that you don't need to be doing this intentionally
in order for it to impact your listener.
this brings us to the second technique, exaggerated
declamation, where you take those natural
fluctuations in speech and amplify them, like
in All Black.
(the space stretches on and the pace that
he's on matters not as he hurtles into the
all black everything) here, the song uses
that "all black everything" refrain as its
primary structural component, referring to
both the emptiness of space and the dehumanization
of chattel slavery, and to make it clear how
important it is, Diggs drops down to an unnatural
monotone at a lower pitch level.
if you were to just read these lines naturally,
you'd probably go down a little bit on that
part, but Diggs takes that tendency to the
extreme, creating a musical motif out of exaggerated
speech patterns.
this can also happen more gradually, like
in Wake Up: (the chance that he ever reaches
any place suitable to support life in his
lifetime's pretty low) where the entire line
slowly descends, ending up what sounds to
me like a perfect 4th below where he started,
although again, the pitch is approximate so
don't quote me on that exact interval.
this creates a dramatic, almost whimsical
feel, bouncing back up at the start of each
line in a deranged, playful sing-song pattern.
Dr. Komaniecki also mentions another common
approach where the rapper keeps raising their
pitch slightly over the course of a verse
to build urgency: the best example I could
find on Splendor and Misery is this bit from
Air 'Em Out "who they want, who the want,
game over, game over, ol' Leech callin' anyone
who aint sober) but you see it a lot from
rappers with more aggressive flows.
for me, though, one of the most interesting
uses of exaggerated declamation comes from
True Believer.
(three siblings happen to be gods and they
fight as siblings do) not a lot of pitch there,
huh?
no, instead Diggs adopts an almost-perfect
monotone, stripping the passage of the emotional
context of speech.
True Believer is a history or, perhaps more
accurately, a creation myth for the world
of Splendor and Misery, and the choice to
remove all his natural inflections creates
a detached, distant feel that highlights that
mythological framework.
these are quite literally tales as old as
time, and the exaggerated monotony drives
that point home.
the third technique is pitch-based rhythmic
layers, and here clipping hands us a perfect,
gift-wrapped example in the form of Baby Don't
Sleep.
the backing track for this song is mostly
just white noise with no rhythmic information,
but Diggs is able to create four rhythmically
distinct sections just by manipulating the
pitch of his voice.
in the verse he starts by emphasizing beats
1 and 3 ('cause your body is bone, marrow,
and blood can never be trusted) but that gets
broken up by sections of double-time.
(nothing is familiar so the strange become
the family) in the chorus, he switches to
a 6/8 feel and plays around with accent placement
instead, first putting it on the 5th beat
(no home you've been there, clearly off safety)
which is traditionally weak, making the rhythm
feel unstable, before moving it back to the
4th beat where it feels like it belongs.
(baby don't sleep, baby don't sleep too much)
and again, all of that is done with just the
pitch of his voice.
these pitch-based rhythmic layers show up
in a couple other songs on the album as well,
like A Better Place: (inside the mind of a
man is a massacre made up of many a miniature
message and misses the most of it) where Diggs
uses pitch to alternate between slower triplets
and a faster galloping rhythm, but despite
their prevalence here, Dr. Komaniecki argues
that this is the rarest of the five techniques,
and I'm inclined to believe him.
after all, just because Daveed Diggs likes
to do it doesn't mean all rappers do, and
Dr. Komaniecki's spent a lot more time studying
this stuff than I have.
but why is it rare?
well, the lack of scholarship on the topic
makes it hard to say for sure, but Dr. Komaniecki
speculates that it may be related to the fact
that, on his spectrum of techniques, pitch-based
rhythmic layers sit right in the middle, not
particularly close to speech or to singing.
this gives them an unnatural, uncanny quality
that may make it feel less appealing and intuitive
to most rappers.
from here, we move on to the singing-like
techniques, starting with the sung interjection.
this is pretty straightforward: we have a
section of rap with a little bit of deliberately
pitched vocalization thrown in for a treat,
like in Wake Up. (so it's one shot in the
arm, one shot in the arm, hazy in the head,
hazy in the head) here I switched back to
notating actual notes because Diggs is singing
actual notes.
these sorts of interjections help add more
dimensions and complexity to a rap verse,
showing off a different vocal texture to break
up the potentially repetitive flow with something
new, and while they've been happening for
about as long as hip-hop's existed, they've
become more and more common in the last few
decades, a trend Dr. Komaniecki attributes
in part to the increased popularity of the
sung hook.
in early hip-hop, the hook could take on lots
of different forms, but over time artists
mostly settled on featuring a singer, usually
an R&B singer, to help round out the song.
from there you started to see artists sing
their own hooks, like in Air 'Em Out: (call
the doctors and the nurses up! whatcha gon'
do about it) and once you have rappers singing
on hooks it's not a huge step for them to
start singing in their verses too.
the thing is, though, many rappers are not
what we might traditionally consider good
singers: they have no training and their voices
tend to sound rough around the edges, but
that may actually be a good thing.
Ja Rule, who helped popularize the trend in
the early 2000s, argues, and I quote: "that's
what made it popular, that they were able
to sing along with it and they weren't intimidated
by singing along to it because it was a guy
that can't sing.” it's kinda like folk music:
the appeal isn't the virtuosity of the singing,
it's the accessibility of it.
it's a really cool dynamic, especially when
you've got someone who is really technically
skilled as a rapper.
it helps to kinda humanize them.
if the rapper is actually a good singer, though,
they may want to take this even further with
the final technique, the sung verse, where,
as the name implies, the entire verse is sung.
I was worried I wouldn't find one of these,
but fortunately for me, Diggs delivers on
Break The Glass.
(I'm so tired of being alone, I'm so tired
of goin' home, won't you help me?)
generally, these sung verses have a relatively
small range and stick to just a few notes,
but they still contain precise, easily recognizable
pitches, which raises an important question:
is this rapping at all?
I mean, not having precise pitch is what sets
rap apart from singing, so how is this not
just singing? it's a fair question, and I
think the best answer is… who cares? we
often talk about rapping and singing like
they're completely different things, but they're
not.
they exist on a spectrum, along with speech,
chant, pattersong, sprechstimme if you know
what that is, and all the other ways humans
can use their voice to express ideas, and
the lines between those categories can get
pretty blurry. these verses are sung, sure,
but they also contain some characteristic
behaviors of rap that you might not expect
from, say, a more conventional pop singer.
it's not uncommon to see relaxed intonation,
speech-like melodies, characteristically hip-hop
rhythms, and timbres more akin to chanting
than traditional singing, and lots of artists,
like Nelly, Bizzy Bone, and Lizzo, to name
a few, have built entire careers in this grey
area.
refusing to count it as rap means losing those
nuances and the insight they provide.
maybe it's not technically wrong, if that
even means anything here, but it's definitely
not useful or interesting.
in the words of Dr. Komaniecki, "analysts
should concern themselves with what's happening
and resist the urge to nitpick over whether
a rapper has misclassified themself."
so what's the conclusion here?
how do rappers use pitch?
honestly, there's too many ways to count.
as we saw, one rapper, on one album, managed
to use it in so many different ways that I
couldn't even fit them all in, and with countless
artists and decades of development, no list
could even begin to do them all justice.
I mean, we didn't even touch on pitch-shifting
software like autotune, mainly because that's
such a complex topic that it really deserves
its own video.
but thanks to Dr. Komaniecki's work, we're
starting to get a better picture of the general
approaches, and I'm excited to see what he
and other hip-hop theorists like him do next.
on a completely unrelated note, my friend
Alex has never heard of Rob Zombie. trust
me, I'm going somewhere with this.
you see, Alex is a fellow YouTuber and, more
importantly, he's 18 years old, and he's started
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on Nebula where he learns about pop culture
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Patrick Willems made him listen to Limp Bizkit,
Devin from Legal Eagle taught him about Gwen
Stefani, and when my turn came around I knew
I had to show him one of the most important
artists in my own musical journey, Rob Zombie.
oh, I should probably mention: Nebula is a
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that's two whole sites of great educational
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bucks, and honestly, even if you never watch
anything else, that's worth it just for Alex's
show.
it's really good.
and hey, thanks for watching, thanks to our
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and extra special thanks to this video's Featured
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if you want to help out, and help us pick
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