The rhyme of English poetry, which developed in bard poetry, has developed into the rhyme of English rap. In rap, which is verbal art, rhymes are basically made to facilitate easy recognition and memory. In the golden age of hip-hop in the 1980s, a pe ...
The rhyme of English poetry, which developed in bard poetry, has developed into the rhyme of English rap. In rap, which is verbal art, rhymes are basically made to facilitate easy recognition and memory. In the golden age of hip-hop in the 1980s, a perfect rhyme pair was pursued like English poems, but in modern times, slant rhymes are recognized as rhymes, where the corresponding pair of rhymes do not entirely match. This phenomenon is believed to be based on the hypothesis that listeners and rappers have inherent psychoacoustic information about the similarity of segments(Steriade 2001, 2003; Kawahara 2007, 2009; Katz 2008, 2015).
This study focuses on the impact of feature similarity of psychoacoustic information on slant rhyme pairs and examines the surface forms of slant rhyming pairs in the lyrics of 80 English raps (5,862 lines in total) and 90 Korean raps (6,302 lines in total) songs by repeatedly listening more than 100 times each. In order to investigate the relationship between feature similarity and rhymability, we employ the Observed-expected value, which indicates the probability of forming a rhyme, and Feature Similarity, which indicates the similarity of the segments. The more similar the two consonants are, the more slant rhymes appear. Based on the statistically analyzed two values, this study evaluates which environment among the major class, place, or manner forms more slant rhymes when an incomplete rhyme is formed. Although Korean rap was born under the influence of English rap, the slant rhymes in Korean rap have some unique characteristics in rhyming pairs. This paper evaluates how speakers use their knowledge of psychoacoustic similarities based on phonetic details in their slant rhymes. The results of this paper show that the speaker uses the knowledge to form verbal art patterns and possesses abundant knowledge of psychoacoustic similarity (Steriade 2001a).