Song of Rap and Rhyme: How Music and Language Interact
For my research, I investigated how rhyme, a syllable constituent, operates within a phonological context. Several papers, including work by Kawahara (2007) and Katz (2015), have investigated rhyme in linguistics, indicating that the distinctive features of a phoneme have a direct effect on how rhymable a pair is and that rhymes don’t need to be perfect. I set out to find out if this was true.
I did this by collecting 25 hip-hop and 25 sung songs and finding the different rhymes each song had. I distinguished the forms of rhymes used in each song and derived their frequency. I then looked at the syllable structure of each rhyme and created types based on how the syllable was built and what phonemes were used.
My research found that imperfect rhymes can cause several different phonological changes to words to maintain the rhyme, such as consonant cluster reduction (fact-that), stress adjustment (style-,versa’tile), and mismatched place and manner of articulation (head-edge, fresh-address). This also indicates that how close a sound is to another is based on how similar the distinctive features are to one another. An example would be sounds having different places of articulation like rhyming ‘fan’ with ‘scam’ or ‘calm’ with ‘call’ for a consonant reduction. In my research, I have established a typology of perfect and imperfect rhymes through the lens of phonological theory.
My work has contributed to the study of rhymes. The main finding was that there are phonological rules on what phonemes are allowed to rhyme with other phonemes in imperfect contexts. In addition, certain phonemes, such as /l/, /r/, and /m/, as well as coda consonant clusters are weakened in rhymed contexts due to the desire to fit a rhyme scheme, variable pronunciation, and casual speech.