From Rhythm to Accent, from Sound to Rhyme

Abstract

The model of flow presented in Flow: The Rhythmic Voice in Rap Music attends carefully to accent and rhyme, yet neither term is easily defined. In the case of accent, the term refers to very different concepts in scholarship on the rhythm of speech and the rhythm of music. This chapter exposits theories from those domains before reconciling them in an accent discovery method calibrated for the rhythm of rap flows. Similarly, the chapter addresses cognitive challenges in representing rhyme, such as temporal boundaries and phonetic similarity.