Pitch Polarity in Praise Singing and Hip-Hop: Evidence for an Underrepresented Poetic Feature

Dula, William S; Carter-Enyi, Aaron; Aina, David Oludaisi; Condit-Schultz, Nathaniel

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Title: Pitch Polarity in Praise Singing and Hip-Hop: Evidence for an Underrepresented Poetic Feature
Author: Dula, William S.
Carter-Enyi, Aaron
Aina, David Oludaisi
Condit-Schultz, Nathaniel
Date: 2018-03-15
Decade: 2010-2019
Abstract: Tonal counterpoint is a common device in the oral improvisatory tradition of Yorb ork (praise-singing), first documented by Olatunji (1984). Both tonal and counterpoint are terms familiar to musicians, but the meaning here is the linguistic tonal, not the harmonic, and the rhetorical counterpoint, not polyphonic. Olatunji describes couplets in which each phrase is parallel if not identical in terms of phonic content and the first sets up a tonal expectancy for the second. The contrast might also be between words within a single phrase. There are three primary categories of tonal counterpoint in Yoruba: parallelism of similar words; homophone change; and non-lexical contrast providing paralinguistic affect. Through the application of computational analysis to a broad corpus, we provide substantial documentation for a phenomenon that may be as ubiquitous in Africana (Black) vocal arts as rhyming is in Indo-European cultures. This presentation incorporates concepts from music theory and linguistics with signal processing techniques to analyze a newly gathered and annotated corpus of recorded music. Keywords: African Languages and Societies; Audio Arts and Acoustics; Digital Humanities; Ethnomusicology; Music Performance; Music Theory; Other Theatre and Performance Studies; Performance Studies; Poetry.
Subject: Poetry
Hip-hop
Comparative linguistics
Document Type: text
Format: application/pdf
Medium: born digital
Collection: Africana Digital Ethnography Project: Multicultural Materials
Institution: Morehouse College
Geographic Location: Georgia--Atlanta
Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12322/adept.mul:0003
Rights: All works in this collection are protected by copyright. For more information or to request a use not granted under the Copyright Educational Use Statement from rightsstatements.org, please contact Aaron Carter-Enyi (aaron.carterenyi@morehouse.edu) with the web URL or handle identification number.
Rights Statement: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC-EDU/1.0/