Le 1er juillet 2017
de 10h00 à 10h30
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
salle 3206
Séance - Sounds of Popular Music (II)
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : Ben Duinker
This paper investigates the perception of metric displacement dissonance between hip-hop music’s main textural layers: flow (the rapped vocals) and beat (the instrumental track). In hip-hop music, such dissonance occurs when syntactic units of the flow and metric units of the beat exhibit nonaligned metric patterning. I suggest that the perception of metric displacement dissonance in hip-hop music usually involves two features. First, while the dissonance is often easy to identify by ear, it is not always clear which textural layer causes it to be perceived. Second, because of musical attributes common to hip-hop such as looped harmonic and rhythmic structures, displacement dissonance often remains unresolved or behaves inconsistently in its resolution.
Songs by A Tribe Called Quest, Nas, and Kool Keith provide examples where metric displacement dissonance can be heard between the flow and beat. To contextualize these examples, I model hypothetical hearings of the songs according to salient musical factors, such as lyrical organization, textural and registral changes, and introductory clues pertaining to metre. These factors can coalesce in composite musical textures where it is unclear which layer (beat or flow) is responsible for the displacement dissonance. Thus, more than one conception of metric structure is possible, a phenomenon characterized by Mark Butler’s term interpretive multiplicity (2006). By showing how displacement dissonance between hip-hop music’s textural layers raises questions of perception, this paper exemplifies the continued appeal of studying musical metre by situating the listening experience as the object of analysis.
