Scotch Snaps in Hip Hop

so I want to talk about this very popular vocal rhythm that's used in a lot of hip-hop and pop music these days and no it's not the triplet flow plenty of other people have talked about that no this one is a lot more subtle but once you notice it you won't be able to unhear it it's everywhere are you ready [Music] this rhythm of a metrically accented sixteenth note followed by a dotted eighth note has a name it's called the Scotch snack named because of its use in traditional Scottish song and dance as well as the Mullins Scottish it's also known as the Strads be rhythm or the Lombard rhythm and can be found in early English and Baroque music so why is this rhythm showing up so much now in American pop music well it might have something to do with how Americans speak English a foot is a basic unit of rhythm used in language a trochee is a foot that has a stressed syllable followed by a weak syllable so for example Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles the stress syllable in this case falls on what we may consider the musical downbeat and many dialects of English the accented syllable is very short when corpus study suggested that among European languages English had the highest percentage of patterns with very short stressed syllables many as short as 100 milliseconds this number is significant in music making because a hundred milliseconds corresponds to the length of a sixteenth note at 140 beats per minute as la buckner on PBS sound field has mentioned modern trap hip hop tempos range from about 110 beats per minute to a hundred and forty beats per minute so what this means is that by using the cadences of certain english TRO keys we will naturally in fact tap trap rap Scotch snaps the Scotch snaps popularity has really ratcheted up in recent years Turkic phrases like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles weren't originally set to a scotch snap [Music] [Applause] but say it in a scotch snap and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles instantly becomes an affectation of a modern hip-hop style not all styles of modern music use Scotch snaps Jamaican dancehall music for example would rarely use the rhythm to make an english in patois feature much longer vowel sounds than American English considered talking versus talking the dialects have different rhythms so a person rapping in a Scotch snap would not sound particularly Jamaican now the average distance between short and long sounds in a given dialect can be measured by something called the normalized pairwise variability index otherwise known as the NP bi quick alternation between long and short sounds yields a higher end P bi and there's actually a formula that can be used to calculate a given languages in P bi and it looks like this which looks impressive so I'm showing it to you my American accent as well as other American accents happen to have a high NP VI we alternate very quickly between short sounds and long sounds Latin languages with lower NPV I like Spanish often use the foot of an info brac or a stressed syllable placed in between two unstressed syllables for example lo siento te quiero el mundo manana the rhythms used in modern Spanish rap follow that pattern like in the song me gente which itself is an amphib rack [Music] that's naps don't really occur that often in music that's not English they sometimes do but honestly fairly infrequently they don't seem to have the same effect as English Scotch snaps it would make sense that the rhythmic characteristics of languages would be reflected in the vocal rhythms of rappers and singers right it just kind of makes sense but what's interesting is that those very characteristics might show up also in the music itself for example consider the Dembo drum groove characteristic - caribbean derived Spanish hip-hop and pop music if you listen to the two snares in the second kick drum you can kind of hear an amphib rack a stress syllable in between two unstressed syllables does this mean that this rhythm is uniquely suited to the Spanish language or at least other languages which use and four acts quite frequently maybe the English musicologists drawled Abraham would write that the nature of a people's language inevitably affects the nature of its music not only an obvious and superficial ways but fundamentally some interesting new research has actually backed that up one study found that the NP VI of American jazz musicians and their speech patterns was reflected in their musical choices how quickly they switched between different subdivisions and also that the npv I was overall higher than the music and speech patterns of Jamaican rhythms producers Anna Ruud Patel the guy who wrote music language and the brain found that melodies composed by French composers had lower and PVI than music written by English composers melodies were statistically more likely to reflect the native tongue of the composer why might this be Patel himself explains we think it has to do with implicit learning of the rhythms of your native language now that's something that we all do when you learn your language as a child you don't just learn the sounds and the words and the syntax you learn that the correct rhythms with which to speak it and this learning begins in infancy we know infants are actually sensitive to the rhythm of their language and can discriminate it from the rhythms of other languages even before they can speak David Bruce has a video where he talks about how he feels the music that he's written has been deeply rhythmically influenced by his native English and notes the prevalence of Scotch snaps in his music the musicologist philip tag in his excellent one hour long documentary on the Scotch snap argues that the music of Scottish immigrants to Appalachia deeply influenced later Americans rhythms and melodies it's simply a syncretic trait in all sorts of english-language popular music to come out of North America regardless of skin it's important to note that the Scotch snap is a musical element that has been socially coded to mean African American which can help to explain some of the controversy over cultural appropriation that surrounds ariana grande's most recent singles seven rings which prominently features a scotch snap ariana grande is not in fact African American the rhythm used to be socially coded to mean Scottish that's where the rhythm came from West African languages tend to have longer and more even vowel sounds so the likelihood that a Scotch snap would originate in that musical culture is a little bit lower social coding and its relation to musical elements is fascinating to me because it can change over time for example the banjo is coded to mean rural American white but it is originally an African instrument it's important to recognize the long history of musical ideas when we talk about things like cultural appropriation because is often a lot more complicated than you might think so next time you hear that Scotch snap in hip-hop maybe it will cause you to pay closer attention to the rhythms that you speak in because those deeply influence the music that you [Music] these

Channel: Adam Neely

Views: 1,052,222

Keywords: adam, neely, jazz, fusion, bass, guitar, lesson, theory, music

Id: i7cG9QIvIWo

Length: 8min 12sec (492 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 11 2019