We've all heard the phrase "music is the universal language," but what if that music/language connection went deeper than we thought?

First, hosts Kirsten and Bey speak with Dr. Ani Patel, the leading expert on the link between language and music in the brain, to learn about his research and the surprising links that have been found between the two. Then, our hosts sit down with Philly-based hip hop artist A.Rob to chat about how language and music interact in the world of rap, from the concept of flow to his experience as a bilingual rapper.

Links for today's episode:

• Learn more about Dr. Ani Patel
• Check out the Sound Health Network's resources on music's use in healthcare
• Learn more about A.Rob, and check out his music!
• Further info on the ancient Arabic rap-battles A.Rob mentioned, a traditional form of poetry known as Zajal

Hello everyone, and welcome to So Curious,

a podcast presented by The Franklin Institute.

Hey, I'm the Bul Bay.

And I'm Kirsten Michelle Cills, and we are your hosts.

Yep, and this host season is the science of music.

And today we're looking at the

relationship between music, language, and communication.

First, we're going to be sitting down with Dr.

Ani Patel to learn about the surprising

links between music and language in the brain.

And then we'll be joined by Philly rapper A.Rob to talk about the concept of flow

within rap and his experience rapping as someone who knows multiple languages.

So, Bay, what is your experience as a hip hop artist?

Like, what's the connection with you with language?

I mean, words, I think, are just as

musical as an instrument because a word makes a sound.

And sometimes a word can sound sharp, round, bouncy, all those different things.

And so I really enjoy the art of bending a word.

Recently, I've gotten into French pop.

I don't speak French, but there is bounce and cadences and pockets that French is

able to get into that you can't do with English.

How does language play, or the rhythm of

language, play in the humor when you're doing comedy?

Yeah, big time.

I would say the biggest resource for a comic is Thesaurus.com.

You should be always looking for a

jazzier, better synonym for the word you're about to say, because so much

comedy comes from the word you choose to say.

I think John Mulaney does this incredibly where he picks these very

theatrical, sometimes old timey words, and the comedy not only comes from what he's

saying, but the extra comedy comes from the word he chose to say.

Instead of saying sad, he says desolate or something.

Or morose. And then that makes something not

only funny because the joke is funny, but then we're all like, "What a weird thing

to say?" So here to give us the brain science perspective is Dr.

Patel.

Welcome to the So Curious podcast, thank you for coming on with us.

How are you? Good.

How are you? Oh, great!

Really happy to be speaking with you.

Can you quickly introduce yourself and let the world know what it is you do?

Sure. I'm Ani Patel.

I'm a professor of psychology at Tufts

University, where I study music in the brain.

And I have to say, I'm a Franklin Institute fan.

I grew up in a Wilmington, Delaware.

Been there many times, many field trips.

So, I'm basically a biologist by training.

My undergraduate and my graduate degrees are in biology, but I just love music.

Starting at the end of college, I got fascinated by the idea of trying to apply

the tools of science and biology to the study of music and the mind.

And so that's what I've been doing since then.

Now, are you a musician yourself?

And if you are, can you give us a little...

Can we hear some? Yeah yeah yeah.

Yeah. Wow, I wish.

Now, I have to hook you up with my

children, who are actually genuine musicians.

I love to play and sing, but I don't have any official training in music.

What is your instrument of choice?

And also, what are your kid's instruments of choice?

I play guitar, and then my son is a drummer and my daughter is a singer.

My wife actually plays bass, so we can actually start a band at some point.

You have the whole team!

That's great.

So you've done a ton of research into the

link between music and language cognition in the brain.

So tell us, how are music and language similar?

Yeah. Well, what I love about studying that

relationship is that they're so obviously different in so many ways.

It's like, you can do fundamentally different things with them.

Like, if I said, here's a sax aphone, try and order a pizza.

Good luck.

You're just not going to get very far.

On the other hand, if I said, try and express some of the most profound emotions

in human life in the next two minutes in words, it's tough.

But take a song and it can absolutely transform your sense of time and space and

emotion and take you places that language alone cannot.

Victor Hugo, who wrote Les Mis and The

Hunchback of Notre Dame, he said, "Music expresses that which cannot be put into

words and that which cannot remain silent", which I think is just such a

wonderful way of saying the power of music is different from the power of language.

They're very obviously different in many ways, but what intrigues me is the hidden

connections, how we can use science to discover those connections and how we can

leverage them sometimes to help people with language disorders.

You just mentioned language disorders.

What do you mean specifically by that? Yeah.

So one really good example of this obvious difference, and yet it's perhaps some

hidden connection, is this long known phenomenon of people who

have strokes and have trouble with language.

So aphasia, problems producing language after stroke.

And this is devastating for humans because we depend on language.

They haven't lost their intelligence.

Sometimes they can actually understand quite a lot.

But when they go to try to put together a

sentence, they just can't get the words together.

It's not a problem with their mouth or their motor control.

It's really a underlying cognitive language problem.

What's been known for a very long time, i

s that some of these people can still sing very fluently, and sometimes can sing

songs like you wouldn't even know anything was wrong with them.

You might think, "Okay, yet another

example of how language and music are fundamentally different."

Except it turns out that if you take people like that, and this was discovered

back in Boston in the 1980s at the Boston VA Hospital, and you use music like

utterances to help them have fluency, you can actually retrain some of their speech

abilities through a program called Melodic intonation therapy.

What that seems to do when you look at the brain, is it seems to take circuits in the

brain that were more specialized for singing and retrain them for speech.

It's not like your brain is completely

fixed in the way it represents language and music.

If they're close enough in what they do,

those circuits can sometimes take over functions from other domains.

For somebody who can't communicate, getting some words back and getting some

fluency back through a singing therapy or melodic therapy can be really meaningful,

especially because there's no pill you can take to cure aphasia.

There's no surgery you can get to cure aphasia.

So what are you going to do?

So at the moment, that's a really interesting therapy that's being

researched more and more to understand how it works in the brain and how we can

optimize it to help people get some language back after brain damage.

Do we have any answers to some of these questions?

Are we still exploring and finding new concepts?

We're starting to get some answers, yeah, through modern neuroscience science.

A colleague who's done a lot of work on Melodic intubation therapy, Dr.

Gotfried Schlaug, who's a neurologist at

the Harvard Medical School, and he has done brain imaging with patients

undergoing this therapy and seen kinds of changes that are happening in their

brains, see how these circuits are changing to support language.

It's really exciting because we're combining these kinds of therapies with

brain science to understand the mechanisms.

This is kind of a new area.

In fact, just in the last five or six years, the National Institute of Health,

the biggest funder of biomedical research in our country from the government, is

investing now in research on music in the brain more than it ever has because they

think these therapeutic benefits can be real, and they want to understand the

mechanisms in order to better make these available and optimized for people.

Dr. Patel, would you say that the brain

understands music and language differently or the exact same way?

Well, what's interesting is there's definitely got to be some overlap.

The question is, at what point do they diverge?

At some trivial level, we have the same set of ears for speech and music.

It's not like you sprout a different set of ears to do music.

We know that you have to have some level

of processing that's shared, basic sound processing.

That's not controversial. But you get higher up in the brain and we

know, on the other hand, there's some specialization.

Like I said at the beginning, language can

use words in ways that instrumental music can't.

But the point is that in between those

complete overlap at the very early levels and very different things at the very high

levels, there's significant amounts of intertwining.

And that's what we're trying to discover using cognitive science and brain science.

So there's no single question like are they the same or are they different?

Yeah. One thing I love that we've been learning

is how innately human music is and how built into us, how it's just part

of the DNA and the atoms in what it is to be a living thing.

Yeah, it seems like music and creativity is a part of the core human experience.

Yeah.

Well, we know it's one of the things that's in every human culture.

No matter how remote you go in the world and how unconnected people are from the

rest of the world, they always have music and they always have speech.

And there's always music in early childhood education.

What are your thoughts on music being a

tool for kids to learn language in those early years of life?

I think it can be very powerful because

they're often also very intertwined early in life.

Kids go back and forth between singing and speaking a lot.

If you think about the way adults speak to children, we use a musical style of speech

almost, the sing song way you talk to babies and infants.

That's been shown to be important in their language development.

And these these hidden connections at this early age are super fascinating.

So, one of the things some of my

colleagues and I are very interested in is research to suggest that there's

connections between nonlinguistic, rhythmic processing, so your ability to

tap to a beat or clap along with the beat , or clap back a rhythm,

and your ability to segment words into their individual sounds as a child, which

is one of the big problems in dyslexia is breaking words into their individual

sounds and understanding that words come apart and you can recombine sounds.

In the minds, these two things, rhythm and

what's called phonological processing, seem to be connected in children.

That is exciting because

children who struggle with those kinds of language problems will end up often with

reading problems, because those language abilities are fundamental to reading.

But if rhythm is related to those abilities, then you can then use rhythm to

either help diagnose early risk for dyslexia, or even treat it by having

rhythmic based exercises that are just fun and games for the kids, but are actually

training brain circuits that are going to be important for reading.

That's super exciting.

A lot of people are really interested in that right now.

What about adults trying to learn a new language?

How does having a musical background maybe

give you an advantage to learning a new language?

Great question.

That's a hot topic right now because there's intuition that having a musical

ear or musical background could help you pick up another language.

But the problem is, it seems to be we need to break that down into subproblems.

There's some evidence, and growing evidence, that having some musical

aptitude or musical training can help you pick up, say, the sounds of a foreign

language and the accents of that language and sound more like a native speaker,

but maybe not so much the vocabulary or the grammar.

So, we got to break down language into

some different parts and see which parts music can help with.

But people teach foreign languages and

want their students to speak like native speakers, they're finding that drawing

students' attention to the rhythm of language and to the melody of speech,

sometimes through music based exercises can really help students learn.

Well, let me ask this.

I think you're in a really unique position, not only because of your

academic background, but as you said, you're a parent.

What have you noticed of watching your kids pick up music?

Is there any particular discoveries you've made in terms of

watching their brain develop and watching them acquire skills?

I promised myself I wouldn't experiment on

my own children! But there were some interesting observations, though.

So when they were little, when they were really small, a year to two years, we

started playing them these lullabies from around the world because there was

this label, Putumayo, that puts out these lullabies from around the world.

And they loved them, and they not understand the word.

Neither could I.

I mean, these were all in all these different languages.

I still remember I played them all these lullabies in different languages for a

year before I put on an English lullaby, one that they could actually understand.

They were like, "What?

You can understand music?

It's not just gibberish?" But they both now have a deep love of learning other

languages, and they're very good at picking up the sounds of other languages.

And so, something about packaging music

and diverse languages early in life in their development, in a way that was

appealing to them, and soothing to them, and reinforcing in a not stressful way.

It wasn't like a lesson, it was just

falling asleep to this wonderful music from around the world,

I think maybe open their ears to both the musicality and the sounds of many

languages because they have both developed a taste for it and really gotten good at.

Does the language that someone speaks affect the music that they would write?

Given that there's so much rhythm and

contour in different languages, does that stuff show up in instrumental pieces?

Yeah, wonderful question.

This is an old intuition that, yes, something about a composer's native

language gets imprinted on their music, even their purely instrumental music.

Something about Debussy's music just reminds people of the French language as

something musicologists wrote back in the '50s.

Or Elgar, who wrote Pomp and circumstance,

the graduation music they played every high school.

That's Elgar.

Something about his music, linguists wrote, just somehow resembles British

speech, even though it's obviously not speech, it's symphonic music.

So this is a really provocative and intriguing idea because when I first read

about it, I was like, "Okay, this sounds crazy at some level.

But at another level, these people are

spending their life listening to music and they have very sensitive ears.

There must be picking up on something." So, one

of my favorite projects was actually tackling this question using scientific

tools to measure rhythm and melody and speech.

And England and France is where I started, because a lot of these people were writing

about people like Debussy and Elgar, and then comparing it to the instrumental

written music of these composers and using the same measurements of speech and music.

And then we showed that there actually was

something to this idea that you could show using science that Debussy's music really

does reflect the French language, the speech, the sounds, the rhythms, the

melodies of the French language and Elgar's music really does reflect the

rhythms and some melodies of British speech.

And we went on to look at other composers in other countries.

Yeah, this was really a neat discovery.

And it combined mathematical measurements of melody and rhythm in language and music

with music history in a way that was really fun.

So what does the future of language music cognition look like?

What new discoveries are happening?

Yeah, what are you excited about?

I'm super excited about these potential practical implications of these early

connections we're seeing between music and language processing in childhood, like the

rhythm stuff I mentioned in relation to speech sound processing.

And I'm not the only one.

There's a growing number of people excited about this because of the potential

practical implications it has for helping kids with language disorders early on when

their brains are still more malleable and training can have a big effect.

So, if your listeners are interested in this, there's a great resource that UCSF

has put together called the Sound Health Network.

It's trying to be a clearing house for all

the kinds of projects that are looking at music and health and the way music can

impact language development in children, or language recovery in adults with

stroke, or how music can help people with Parkinson's disease to walk more fluidly

as they often do when there's music on, both basic research and applied research.

This is something that's grown up as a collaboration between the National

Institute of Health, the Kennedy Center, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

They partnered to make this information more accessible to fund this research.

Just the last few years have been a turning point for those of us that have

been in the field of music in the brain for a while, to see this interest and

excitement about the practical implications of this work.

The other one that's coming up that we'll see more and more of is this early use of

rhythm with children, both to help predict which children will end up with

having reading problems based on tree spout processing, and then to treat

through rhythmic based therapies these children and to help them get on a better

path with the underlying mechanisms that are going to be important for reading

before they start to actually have struggle.

I mean, that's kind of a dream, but it's exciting.

Yeah, absolutely.

We should absolutely work towards

preventative measures instead of just reactive measures.

And I love the fact that

there are people putting forth some effort in that direction.

Well, Dr.

Ani Patel, thank you so much for being here.

This was a real pleasure.

Thank you for talking to us today. Absolutely.

We had a lot of fun. This is fun.

Yeah, thank you so much for the invitation.

Thanks. Bye now.

Thanks again, Dr.

Patel, for taking time to speak with us!

I thought it was interesting, what he said about how this can help treat dyslexia.

It outlines how much is happening in a split second.

Deciphering, code, timing, rhythm, cognitive function. And I'm oftentime

walking away from these conversations amazed.

I'm just like, mind blown.

It validates the fact that I need to take

two naps a day, because there's a lot going on up there, just as humans.

So switching gears a little bit, we are

now joined in studio by local rapper A.Rob. Welcome!

Super excited to have this conversation.

Really good friend of mine.

I won't get into all the back story, but

can you introduce yourself and tell us what it is you do?

Yeah.

My name is Ameen Rahman, but my stage name is A.Rob, A-Dot-R-O-B.

That stands for Always Remember Our Blessings.

I'm a Palestinian-American rapper, hip hop artist, and audio engineer

here based in Philly, originally from Harrisburg, PA.

All right, A.Rob, can we hear a snippet of your music?

Absolutely, I got you.

A.Rob, how did you get into rapping?

What's the origin story?

Really, middle school banging on lunch tables.

Everybody in my area, in my middle school and high school wanted to rap.

We would do exactly that.

Go to lunch, make beats on the tables, and

battle each other, see who could be most clever.

And everybody listened to hip hop.

It was all rap and R&B for me growing up.

We wanted to try to be clever like Lil

Wayne, or see what cool similes and metaphors we could come up

with. Or, you know, battle rap was big too.

We wanted to battle everyone.

So, we just tried it and I was pretty good at it since a young age.

I was good at poetry in elementary school and it kind of just translated in the rap.

Did you know anyone growing up in your

real life that was a professional musician?

Like, when did you come to realize, "Oh,

this is what I'm going to actually make my life?"

I didn't really know anybody who was doing it on a major scale of any sort.

I was always told that I have a relative

in Puerto Rico that's a famous singer, but never met him.

So I don't know.

Once I realized I was good and I believed

that it was good enough and I wanted people to hear it and I thought people

should hear it, I was like, I'm really going to take this seriously.

The focus of this episode is going to be language and music.

And you are a Palestinianian hip hop artist.

Tell us about your identity and how you identify.

I don't like to be looked at solely as a

Palestinian rapper, but I am a rapper who is Palestinian.

And I do really take pride in talking

about my culture and incorporating it into my music any way that I can.

The Arabic language finds its way into your music?

Yes, it does.

I'm not 100% fluent, but I'm conversational in Arabic. So, I'll

incorporate Arabic words just randomly here and there.

If you're ever listening to one of my

songs and you're like, I don't know that word, it's probably an Arabic word.

And can you talk about the rhythm and cadence that I guess English presents

versus the rhythm and cadence that Arabic presents?

Yeah, there's some similarities for sure.

I mean, there's ancient Arabic rap circles.

They would gather and almost do rap battles in Arabic way back in the day.

It can be similar in those ways,

like lyrically, but instrumentally, it's different.

Arabic drums are always different.

Arabic string instruments, like the oud.

It's sort of like a guitar, but it's played totally differently.

And there's different scales.

It's similar and different in a lot of ways.

I was just curious to say, how do you find your footing in those differences?

Because you go back and forth pretty seamlessly.

I've heard you go.

And then collaborating, too, must be interesting because if you're

collaborating with people who aren't familiar with these sounds, with this

language, and trying to find ways to make them all work together.

Yeah. I mean, I try to make it seamless.

I try to incorporate the sounds and the instruments into my music.

And like we said already, the words go back and forth.

And it could be a New Age hip hop instrumental with some tabla drum in it,

which is a Middle Eastern drum that you hold on your lap and play with your hands.

Fire. So I don't know.

I try to intertwine everything. That's dope.

That's dope. In what's your mindset as an artist?

Are you conscious of the mixing and

blending that you're doing, or is that just something that happens naturally?

I made a conscious decision, especially

more recently. Like the last few years, I really made a conscious decision to

proudly talk about my culture and heritage and talk about Palestine in my music.

Really just give my people a voice because there's not really many Palestinian

artists in America, at least, that have that kind of voice.

And when they do,

they keep it tucked under the rug and they don't want to ruffle any feathers.

But I've made the conscious decision to

talk about it and make it clear and apparent to anyone listening to my music.

Just give my people a voice.

So, Bey and I love when we get to interview each other.

So I'm going to ask you both this question Okay!

Because we're doing this science of music. Bey is a musician.

I'm a professional stand up comic, I am not a musician.

So both of you, please, can

you explain flow to listeners who are maybe unfamiliar with the hip hop genre?

What is flow?

What are these, maybe shorthands that you're using.

For me, I think flow is finding the vocal,

rhythmic pattern that sits well with the soundscape.

Is that true for you?

That's definitely true.

I mean, I think of it as like a river or a stream flowing, right?

If the instrumentation is like the earth or the ground, then the lyrics and the

rhythmic patterns and the words that you're using have to flow through it in a

way that's appealing and fits with the structure.

It's just literally like a flow of water.

It can also be synonymous just with rap in general.

You can be like, Oh, he flows, meaning he raps, or they're over their flowing.

You already know that means they're over there rapping.

Yeah.

And so is flow something that you feel like you always had even when writing

poetry, even when there was no music behind it?

Yeah. I guess it might be natural.

It might be God given.

You might just be born with flow.

I'm not sure.

You can definitely hone it and work on it and practice it like anything.

But yeah, I feel like I've had it for as long as I can remember.

I mean, how did you find the rhythm in words?

When did you first realize, like oh, these are five syllabus, and I can break this

apart and rhyme it with these two syllabus, and so on and so forth.

How did you stumble upon that for yourself?

I think listening to just some of my

favorite artists, like going back to Eminem and how he does that.

He'll just break down syllables, and he'll

have 10 syllables that rhyme with the next 10 syllables.

And you're like, okay, that's intricate.

Or one of my favorites growing up was Lupe

Fiasco, and he would have a lot of those real intricate rhyme schemes.

And I was like, lkay, let me try that.

And it just kind of came to me.

And I was like, "All right, I can do this. This is fun.

I can rhyme multiple syllables together." And yeah, it just panned out.

Yeah. And I think also having that part part of

your brain from the beginning of appreciating it and noticing it.

Because there's plenty of people who are

not necessarily musical people who can enjoy listening to music without being

able to say like, oh, that was craftsmanship.

Eminem, making 10 syllables rhyme with the next 10 syllables, whatever.

And I imagine like all artists, that's got

to ignite something in you where you're like, "Oh, damn.

I want to do that!"Yeah.

Well, I know a lot of people that will

listen to a song and they'll just hear the beat.

I have friends that need to listen to a

song 10 times before they memorize one line.

I'm like, you play me the song one time, I can basically recite it back to you.

I go straight for the words. I'm the same way

That might just be a natural thing.

Are you the same way?

I'm a big word person. Yeah.

Obviously, as a writer in comedy, I can

watch a show and I can remember it verbatim.

What are you hearing and what are you listening for?

Is it pattern? Is it speech?

Is it phrasing? Is it timing?

It's phrasing for sure.

Because I teach stand up comedy classes.

So now that I teach people how to write

jokes and the formulas and all that behind it. You know, once you're in the industry

and you start breaking it down, all of a sudden you're like, "Oh, that was genius!

That was exactly what I was trying to explain to the class.

I'm going to save that and show it to

them." So maybe it is just like an appreciation, at least for me.

I mean, yeah, what is it for you?

What are you listening for?

The rhyme schemes, definitely the rhyme schemes at first.

And if there's like, the multi-syllable patterns, that's really impressive to me.

And then just clever word play.

Similes and metaphors are huge in rap.

And when somebody has something really clever, I'm like, oh, how did you relate

rap to the whole universe in such a clever way?

And I'm like, okay, that was fire.

And that sounds so funny because that

sounds like a reward system that the brain is picking up on.

When you talked about, I guess the reveal

or the punchline of like, "Oh, they said this prior and it matches in this

particular pattern." The prestige of it, I guess.

So your writing process, are you words first, beat first, combination of both?

I'm beat first. How about you?

It's a mess for me.

It's wherever I'm at.

Sometimes I have started with just lyrics.

I don't have any musical instruments at home.

It's just me. And again, it's unpredictable.

I need to kind of -

I can start from a place of no music, just writing lyrics, and then I'll stop and I'm

like, I need music to push this further a little bit more.

And that's when I reach out to collaborators or whoever else and we'll

find some sounds and then we'll take it from there.

Sometimes it's the opposite.

Sometimes I do start with a beat.

So yeah, it's it's all over the place for me.

I like the way words sound.

And I definitely want to throw this

question at you because you know different languages, and I feel like you can hear

different things and it affects how you listen.

That's really big for me.

I don't know if that's the same for you.

And I don't know if understanding Arabic phrases changes how you listen,

and what you can hear and how you can pattern match?

Yeah. I mean, it changes how I write for sure.

I feel like I have a cheat code because if

I'm like nothing wrong, rhymes in English, something might run in Arabic, though.

Good hack! Yeah.

It's a hack. I'm like, I have nothing that runs with

this in English, so let's try something else.

But that's pretty cool that you just go a cappella a lot of the time.

I need to reach out to producers first, and I just listen. I listen to like a

hundred beats before anything catches my ear.

And then once it catches my ear, I'm like, Okay, I really like this.

And it just starts coming in.

Just starts flowing, ideas start populating and I'm like -

I just getting ready to say flow.

When you find yourself in that moment of inspiration, it's like, ":Okay, this is

matching with that, and this is matching with that." And then you hit a particular

working rhythm, and you're working this creativity.

It's a special thing for any of us to

create and ponder and come up with something.

With music, I think it's really interesting, Bey, what you said about,

you said, I like the way words sound.

And also in other languages, famously,

different languages have different musicality to them.

Some languages are very glottal, like in the back of your throat.

Some languages are very forward.

We talked about accents yesterday about

how Australian is like, Hello, how are you?

It's all in the back. That was pretty good!

Like "Naui".

Yeah, it's all in the back and very smiley.

Different words,

they literally make different sounds, and the sounds create different feelings.

And that's such a musician thing to say.

Yeah, we're super emotional. I'm super emotional.

So I'm like, How does this feel?

But let me ask you about free styling.

How does your mind find the words in real time when you're rapping?

Yeah.

I mean, free styling, you know a lot of people will call it a free style nowadays

when it's not, when it's really just a free verse that was memorized.

But true, coming up with it on the spot free styling is like, I enjoy it.

A lot of rappers are like, don't ask me to do that.

They don't want to embarrass themselves.

Because it's vulnerable, right? It is.

It's stripped down. It's improv.

It's the most stripped down form of rap.

We can sit here and think and come up with

the most clever thing if you give us enough time.

But when it's like, Just do it in a moment.

It will be something that's a little bit

more just straightforward, generally speaking.

Yeah, but I just need a word.

Like It could be something I'm looking at, or it could be something that...

If we take Franklin Institute, I'll just

take those lines and like - Franklin Institute, I spit the truth.

It's fire. I lit the booth.

I got to sit with Bul, something like that!

And that's patterns, right?

To me, I keep coming back to pattern matching.

That is a pattern that you follow until

maybe you switch the flow and then try a different cadence.

We always like to leave our listeners with

some insight from the pros in the industry we're talking about.

So, what is some advice that you might have for people like you were years ago,

ninth grade, people who are looking to get started in rapping?

Make sure you love it.

Make sure you really love it because just like anything, I guess, if you really want

to do something and you're just doing it because you think it's cool or you think

you might be successful at it, that's not going to lead you as far as it

would if you actually care about it and love it, because you're going to need to

put in a lot of time and really just study the music that you like, study the

musicians that you love, and don't really try to emulate them.

Maybe at first as a practice, but

learn from the greats and then forget everything you knew.

And then you'll be your own self.

Find your own voice, too, which might take a long time.

But just don't try to be like anybody else and practice, free style, write a lot.

Even if it's, I can't tell you how many

verses I've written that are in the trash and they will never be - I have a shoe

box, probably a few shoeboxes full of verses that I wrote in high school and

college on paper that are never going to be used anywhere.

But it's all good practice.

So I would just say love it, write a lot,

free style a lot, and study the music that you love.

Hell yeah. Well said.

That's perfect. Wow.

I feel very inspired.

I know I do not have an upcoming rap career, but...

You never know. You never know, right?

You never know.

And real quick, do you want to plug any of your socials?

Yeah, absolutely.

@ arobsmusic everywhere, A-R-O-B-S Music.

That's all social media.

And Spotify, Apple all that is A.

Rob.

Hope you check out the music.

Thank you guys so much for having me. Hell yeah.

It's been a lot of fun.

Thank you. Awesome.

Thank you so much, A.Rob, for coming on the show.

We're going to need to hear a full version of that Franklin Institute freestyle

sometime, because I feel like there's a collab coming.

Franklin Institute Freestyle, stay it five times fast.

Franklin Institute Freestyle.

Fra - ah frick... All right.

And be sure to join us next week when we

look at all the connections between music and memory.

Why do songs make us remember the past so well?

How do songs get stuck in our head?

And how is music used to make us remember things without us even realizing it?

When you need to be able to remember the

letters of the alphabet in order, that's when it can be particularly

helpful to use music, because that chains them together in the proper order.

We have all that and we have so much more.

So speaking of memory, I would like you all to remember...

Do remember! Do remember!

To listen and subscribe.

And please leave us a five star review.

It goes such a long way for a podcast like

ours so we can get this awesome, awesome info out to people.

Thank you so much for much, tune in next Tuesday and Go Birds.

This podcast is made in partnership with

RADIOKISMET, Philadelphia's premier podcast production studio.

This podcast is produced by Amy Carson.

The Franklin Institute's director of digital editorial is Joy Montefusco.

Dr.

Jayatri Das is the Franklin Institute's Chief Bioscientist.

And Erin Armstrong runs marketing, communications, and digital media.

Head of operations is Christopher Plant.

Our mixing engineer is Justin Berger, and our audio editor is Lauren DeLucca.

Our graphic designer is Emma Seeger.

And I'm the Bul Bey.

And I'm Kirsten Michelle Cills. Thanks.

Thank you! See ya!