In this episode, Olivia Lucas and Mazbou Q discuss ways to use techniques from hip hop to build skills in the music theory and aural skills classroom. 

This episode was produced by Jose Garza along with Team Lead Jennifer Weaver. Special thanks to peer reviewers Leah Frederick and Danny Jenkins.

SMT-Pod’s theme music was written by Maria Tartaglia, with closing music by Yike Zhang. For supplementary materials on this episode and more information on our authors and composers, check out our website: https://smt-pod.org/episodes/

[Intro Theme by Maria Tartaglia.]

Welcome to SMT-Pod, the premier audio publication of the Society for Music Theory! In this episode, Olivia Lucas and Mazbou Q discuss ways to use techniques from hip hop to build skills in the music theory and aural skills classroom.

Hi, SMT Pod! I’m Olivia Lucas

And I’m Mazbou Q.

So today, we're going to be talking about how to teach music theory, using hip hop. Specifically, we're going to look at how things like triplets, hemiola, accent patterns, microtiming, and swing operate within a rap context and how to communicate that in our teaching. We'll explore how to build practical lesson plans that can be brought into music, theory and aural skills classrooms that really show students how to both recognize and hear the kinds of patterns that come up in hip hop, and then how to create and produce those patterns on their own.

Yeah, I mean, I think a big part of this conversation is the whole bridging of gaps. I mean, there's hip hop, and there's music theory, and, as you said, there’s how we talk about rhythm, and there's how we hear rhythm.

So before we get into that, why don't we talk a bit about who we are and why we're here together? So I'm a music theorist, and most of my research work has been on heavy metal music and specifically on rhythmic complexity and groove and performance issues. And that has sort of translated over into my teaching, and I've gotten more and more passionate about improving the way we teach rhythm and meter concepts, and how to make them more relatable and alive and relevant for our students in the classroom. And given how many of our students are listening to rap and hip hop every day, it seems like a natural place to go for improving that area of our teaching.

So I first came across Maz's work on a viral Twitter post, and it was about triplet accent patterns in hip hop. And I really admired the way that it broke this idea down in a way that was really theoretically rigorous, but also really approachable. And I also noticed that this guy Maz was being referred to as the “rap scientist”. So, Maz, do you want to talk a bit about yourself and your background, and how you got that name?

Yeah, so I'm an artist, producer, and now content creator by the name of Mazbou Q. I actually started playing music when I was very small. My parents sort of forced me into doing classical piano for a few years. And I did that and I sort of picked up a few instruments throughout school. I got into a variety of different music and expressed myself there in different ways.

Eventually, as I grew up, I fell in love with hip hop and wanted to make my own. But all the different ways where I sort of expressed myself in music, found my identity as a Nigerian New Zealander through music, they sort of culminated in this kind of way of approaching and analyzing and drawing threads between hip hop and different styles of music and highlighting the rhythmic element and then diving deep into the theoretical component of the rhythm.

So there was this one video in particular called “Don't Rap On Beat, Rap Behind the Beat” where I was explaining my approach to like a lazy rap flow, what we’ll soon discuss as microtiming. And people were really enthralled by that, they were really intrigued by this guy on social media talking about rap in such an analytical way. I didn't think it was analytical at the time, but you know, people interpreted it that way. And yeah, they got really excited and energized by it and started calling me, hey, this guy’s a rap professor, the rap scientist. So I leaned into that label as a kind of branding decision, as a marketing decision and then things went from there. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, it certainly seems like it's worked for you because you’ve got a pretty sizable following these days.

So I think it was September 2021 that the rapping behind the beat video went viral. And since then, you’ve had lots of interest in your work. Why do you think there’s been so much interest in these music theory-oriented videos specifically?

Yeah, I think it seems to me that there are two groups, two main groups of people who take a lot of interest in my work. So there are rappers and hip hop enthusiasts who have their suspicions about the theoretical and analytical nature of hip hop being confirmed when they see this. You know what I'm saying? I think in terms of music theory and hip hop colliding in the, in the popular sphere doesn't seem to be super present. I know a lot of that's happening at the academic levels, but at the popular sphere, people haven't really seen it. So when they saw me doing that, they're like, oh, well, OK.

Yeah, hip hop’s deep like that and it sort of dispels this unfortunate notion that hip hop isn’t real music. But then there are also the people who are just generally musicians, music fans, or just interested in music and have this kind of peripheral interest in hip hop or music theory and who are seeing what I do. And they’re like, okay, no, this is interesting. I didn’t realize I could learn more about rhythm contextualized this way. Or even just from a purely communicative perspective, okay, here’s someone who’s communicating a complex topic in a digestible form. So I get a lot of communicators who aren’t even within music who are interested in what I do. So yeah, I think it’s those things.

Yeah, so you've been teaching online both in this sort of like as a social media content creator and then I think you do some like one-on-one teaching as well and I know you've done classroom teaching both at home in New Zealand as well as here in the States on your various visits to academic institutions. So now that you’ve done both, what do you think are some of the main similarities and differences between teaching music theory on social media versus in a more traditional classroom?

Yeah, I mean, the differences would be from my perspective and my experience anyway, is that the level of buy-in that people have to the idea of studying music. So in the public domain, I have to kind of convince people that studying music is something that is worthwhile. You know, there’s this more widespread perception that music is a purely intuitive process. It’s purely something that is sort of learned experientially, and the idea of theorizing it or analyzing it is completely superfluous. So a lot of people, there will be a lot of resistance there, and I’ll have to overcome the hurdle of saying, hey, look, this is a useful way to think about music, I promise it’s going to help you.

You know, I have to engage in a little bit of persuasion there first before we even talk about the concept itself. Whereas I feel like in the classroom, at least to some degree, that’s already a given. I mean, they’re there to study music. So you know, that's a hurdle. Don’t have to scale as high. In terms of the similarities, yeah, I mean, I think everyone’s inquisitive, everyone’s interested about seeing things recontextualized. Everyone wants feedback on their own work. People want to, you know, be able to, you know, reproduce the kind of things that you are teaching and have a way of having that, you know, either graded or validated. So you know, these things are similar.

Yeah, I mean, that all sounds very true to my experience as well. Not that I have much social media teaching experience, but that classroom experience, for sure. Another thing that I feel like we deal with, especially here in the United States, and I think this is the case in some other countries as well, is that we’ve built this sort of artificial divide between what we call music theory, which is generally a written course where the focus is on written analytical work versus what we call aural skills, which tends to be more focused on these more practical skills, like producing various rhythmic patterns, sight singing, producing various kinds of pitch patterns and so forth.

And I think as far as what we’re going to be talking about today, a lot of the kinds of skills we’re going to be talking about are what would in the United States often be things that would take place in an aural skills classroom where you’re working more on like that practical production side. But I’m always interested in sort of questioning that divide and thinking about how we can make music theory and aural skills more interrelated as they should be. But just a heads up for all the theory teachers listening, a lot of this I think might in our current system work best in an aural skills environment. And if you’re lucky enough to have both of those things together, then easy peasy for you. But anyways.

I want to transition now to discussing some concrete examples of how you approach music theory topics having to do with rhythm and meter, things like accent pattern, grouping, microtiming, and talking about how the methods you use and the kinds of examples you build can be integrated into that larger classroom setting. And I was thinking that we could start with the concept of triplets and hemiola, these patterns that arise frequently, not only in hip hop, but in a lot of kinds of music. Could you start by talking about how you explain and demonstrate those concepts in your work?

Yeah, so I do love to start off with an example of music that’s largely trending at the moment. The benefit of being within the realm of hip hop is it’s so widely listened to that I can pull from a large artist pool of artists that students are listening to and engaging with and that will quickly resonate with. So this particular example, I'll play the audio in a second, is a song called “Radar” by JID, and he’s using this kind of triplet flow and juxtaposing between, you know, grouping it in three, which is the standard, and then moving between the twos, which is the hemiola.

And I think it’s worth noting as well, for those who are actually trying to rap, like the whole triplet rapping thing has become huge within the last sort of 10 to 15 years. It's almost like the norm now as opposed to what was going on in the 90s and early 2000s. So this subject is very, very popular. A lot of people are looking to see how they can integrate it in their own work and for that reason, it's a really effective teaching tool. But I’ll play the example and I’ll talk a bit more about how I break it down for the students and audience.

[clip of “Radar” by JID plays]

So yeah, you’ll have to excuse the crass lyrics there, unfortunately, that’s a lot of what you get with some of these examples, but yeah, they’re effective, they resonate with the students. So with this example in particular, we’re listening to the rap flow, we’re listening to what he does. So I usually include a visual element to this, a transcription. I don’t use standard notation, but I use a kind of modified custom notation that I’ve built based on standard notation that at least sort of preserves the rhythmic element. I include the lyrics there so they can really see. And as you could hear in that example, you could hear the, I got that did you like with the ladder, the one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one.

You can feel that for the first bar and then you can feel and slip into the ladder, I could like with a stove, ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, three, one.

So you can hear those groupings quite well. And when I slow it down like that and explain it like that with the clicks and the numbers, I think the students really start to, to really understand what’s going on. And they start to, you know, listen more intently to the, to the music that they are consuming in their own time, which is filled with this kind of stuff. And then I’ll go into sort of, I love to, being a, being a practitioner myself, I love to create my own works that is very on the nose in terms of these concepts.

So one of the videos that I have produced, is a verse of me literally cycling through these different hemiola patterns like going from groups of three to four to five to six and indicating visually in the videos when this switch is happening so that they can hear the change and see what groupings that the change represents and that allows them again to deepen their understanding all the while being within this world of music that they that they know and love so I'll play that example now.

[clip from Mazbou Q’ triplets video]

So one thing I’ll also say about that video is you might have noticed that I kind of, and this relates to the topic of the difference between teaching in the classroom and in the public domain, just the kind of language I use, I don’t default to using the music jargon. Sometimes I pull it back in and for example, in this video, I talked about emphasizing syllables as opposed to accenting notes, right? So, kind of trying to meet people where they’re at, like where they already have an intuitive understanding and pull them towards the more theoretical side rather than going in gung ho with the music language.

Right. And I think that’s what helps make the videos so accessible and so widely appealing and popular. But I feel like that’s something that a classroom theory teacher, they can always bring in that terminology as they need to. But I know for myself, I always try to start from a position of intuition as well, as much as I can, even if I am trying to build that rigorous toolbox of technical terms at the end of the day.

And I know you mentioned your visuals, which of course we can’t see in this audio format. But I do love the way you’ve developed your own sort of modified box and dot notation to help visualize everything that you’re explaining. It’s really clear and doesn’t require any knowledge of staff notation or drum notation or anything like that.

So I feel like these examples, the commercial examples and the ones that you build in your own work for your videos, does a great job of introducing students to that aural recognition skill, you know, being able to recognize patterns when they hear them. And one thing that we’re constantly trying to do in the classroom is like first build that level of understanding, right? Can you recognize it when you hear it? And then of course, the next level is like, can you do it yourself? So what do you do to help students start to build that skill of actually being able to produce those kinds of rhythmic patterns?

Yeah, so this is where the benefit of being a practitioner comes into it, because we can, I can design, I guess demonstrations that I intend to be interactive. So like a short phrase that I will rap and I’ll have the students rap back to me, rap along with me and stuff you know that it sounds good and sounds at least within the realm of things that they will listen to and then that allows them to be able to start reproducing these things and have the guidance of, you know, a practitioner with them and then sort of when that’s established, they can go on to perhaps doing their own exercise. But the kind of interactive demonstrations, uh, that I would do, um, would be, would be like this. So I'll come up with a phrase.

For example, “I can switch up my triplets with my emphasis,” which is like 12 syllables long and corresponds to like a bar of eighth note triplets. And then I'll rap it with different accent patterns, accent configurations. I’ll rap it over a beat and perhaps get them to rap it back to me after or I'll get them to rap it along with me. So what I’ll do is that I’ll just do a quick demo of the different ways this might look and and so you can get an idea of what that what it would be.

So I start by playing the beat. And then I count in. And then I rap, and then they rap back.

[Mazbou Q rapping over the beat]

And then they come back and do that. I’ll expect them to come back in and you know repeat it back to me or perhaps another way would be them to just rap along with me once they catch it.

And okay, this is the triplet emphasis group of three like the kind of standard one and then we’ll move on using the same phrase we’ll pick different syllables in that phrase the emphasis to construct the the triplet emphasis group of two, so I’ll just quickly demonstrate what that would sound like with the same phrase.

[Mazbou Q rapping over the beat]

Two, three, four, and they’ll come back and do the same thing again so that now they’re used to reproducing three and reproducing two and then once we’ve done that we can move on to something like four which sounds like this:

[Mazbou Q rapping over the beat]

And so on and so forth and then once you’ve you know done the static two, the three, the four, you can move on to groups, accent pattern grouping ,so we start off with two and then five, then five, and again we’re using the same phrase and we’re just picking different syllables to emphasize so I’ll show you what two-five-five might be like.

[Mazbou Q rapping over beat]

You know what I’m saying, so it’s just going through that that same phrase emphasizing the different syllables getting to really feel what these different groupings feel like um and so they can you know bring this to a kind of intuitive level at least enough so that they’re ready to perhaps start with a more hands-off exercise into hands-off in terms of me not really sort of guiding them, them just doing their own thing.

Yeah, that seems like such a great way to go about building that kind of embodied knowledge and that ability to, as you say, start producing those patterns themselves. It also seems really doable and practical. It seems like something you could do in a group setting. It seems like you could do something in a small group setting or in a one-on-one situation, like a recitation. And it doesn’t really rely on the teacher being like a really skilled rapper either, right? Because these are patterns that any of us could learn to reproduce. And then you just need like a simple backbeat pattern with a clear, metrical framework for everybody to rap over and you’re on your way.

Exactly

Yeah, and you could have students, you know, do it on their own and record and and submit it to you as an assignment, for example.

Yeah, yeah, yeah actually on that like, I mean to help our listeners to understand what that could look, like I’ve designed a little bit of an exercise. So for example, you might give them a sheet or you might put something on the board where you say, “look, rap The following line as an eighth note triplet phrase with the following groupings.” And then you might give them five different groupings.

For example, I’ve got here the first one you’ve got six groups of two, second one you’ve got four groups of three. Again, we're working with eighth note triplets. Then, you might have a group of three-two-two-two-three and then four-four-two-two or three-five-four, any kind of configuration that adds up to twelve that gets them and then you can give them a phrase like, I like to use a generally uplifting phrase that won’t be harmful for students to rap, like “we cannot be stopped ’cause we keep moving forward.”

And then I’ll ask them for each grouping pattern, edit the lyrics as needed in order to preserve the natural stress pattern of each word. So, the difference between this and what we were doing before was that we were just emphasizing the syllables, right, even if we were butchering the word. But now I’m trying to get them to understand, hey, words have their own emphasis patterns. Perhaps now you need to be a little bit creative and switch the wording so that we can maintain the fidelity of the natural stress pattern of the words, but also hit those accent patterns. So I’ll be like, change the lyrics a little bit, adjust the lyrics, but try and hit these accent patterns with them. And then I’ll ask them to sort of go through it. So.

The first one, for example, the two-two-two-two-two-two similar to what we’re going through together: [snapping beat] “We cannot be stopped cuz we keep moving forward, We cannot be stopped ‘cause we keep moving forward, We cannot be stopped ‘cause we keep moving forward,” like that would be a solution. I'll expect them to come up with a solution for four groups of three: [snapping beat] “We can't be stopped ‘cause we just keep on moving. We can’t be stopped ‘cause we just keep on moving. We can’t be stopped cause we just keep on moving. So one two three one,” and you can see a couple of those words had to change there.

So I'd expect them to sort of go through and match the phrase patterns to the accent patterns that I give them, make appropriate adjustments, so they can you know understand how these things work, and then you submit their recordings and then you know.

Yeah, and that helps helps them, you know build that sensitivity to that relationship between language and rhythm. And especially if you've got any students studying composition, that can be so important, and at the same time they're already used to using syllabic patterns that may or may not have clear, like lexical meanings or not, right, as a way to build rhythmic knowledge and knowledge of rhythmic patterns. And this sort of takes that to the next level, I feel like.

Yeah, for sure.

So building off of this work on triplets and hemiola, which as you said, right, is this super popular flow pattern right now. It seems like you could build off of that to get students working on and developing and performing a whole variety of accent patterns that might be common in hip hop or even in other kinds of music. Could you talk about some of your other work on the various kinds of accent patterns that arise in hip hop?

Yeah, so the triplet and the hemiola thing is a good way to sort of get students used to the idea that, oh, there's like a groove on top of like a base rhythm, or grooves can be switched by changing where accents are placed. And I like to call that a meta-rhythm, because it is this idea of a rhythm on top of rhythm. And I like to explain the function of these grooves, the function of the different placements of the accents, what they actually do to the music, what they do to the feeling of the music. But before I go on more of that, I'll play this example that really drives the point home.

It's this song by Eminem called “Godzilla,” featuring Juice WRLD, in particular the section at the end, where the modification or the adjustment of accent patterns really obviously changes the feel and changes the energy of the section of the rap flow. So I'll play it for you now.

[clip from “Godzilla” plays]

So I kind of, I mean we obviously will go through something like that a bit slower, but what you can hear is that the 4 on the floor accent patterns. [snapping beat] And then after that 4 bars he sort of progresses into this 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 1, 2, 3, this thing. And it feels like an increase in, not tempo, but an increase in energy. It feels like we're shifting gears. So I like to explain that there's also a function to this kind of thing. And I find that that deepens people's understanding.

And what I also like to talk about is, I mean, this is a little bit adjacent, but the idea of having different tools of accentuation. And it gets kind of students to lean in a little bit more and be like, okay, what am I listening to? Because it's not just an increase in volume on a particular note or syllable. Sometimes it's just the fact that you're using a hard consonant. These create the accent. So it might be like a tonal difference, it might be a pitch difference, you know. I get students to really engage with the fact that accentuation looks different when we're applying it to rap. And so that's a fun way for them to, yeah.

Yeah, I love that you bring up the idea of function and purpose, because I think our students are generally used to thinking about that. But especially in terms of harmonic function, right? Like what is this chord doing? What is this pitch doing? But they haven’t had as much attention put on rhythmic function and why, you know, a certain rhythm needs to be a certain way for an expressive purpose.

And I think that helps build that connection as well, which then, of course, makes learning the theory a lot more meaningful for them. Yeah, and so going from the Eminem, right, which is, of course, this very technical example because he's a very technical rapper and he's really showing off in this passage. I'm sure you slow it down and everything to help students break it down. But then how would you, again, go to that next level of getting beyond aural recognition to getting the students building different kinds of accent patterns on their own?

Yeah, so I think it's a similar thing to triplets and hemiola. We would provide a lyric line and then alongside that, provide also an instrumental or simple backbeat pattern and then have the students put the lyric line into different rhythms and accent patterns, ones that we provide them with. And then have them record it and sort of send it back. And then this time we have the opportunity to create constraints and variations on the exercises to get them to think about it in different ways and approach it from different angles. So one constraint would be the students have to, like I said, modify the lyrics such that the natural stress pattern of each word is preserved.

So you're not just emphasizing syllables and creating incomprehensible phrases, you know what I'm saying? Your word selection has to account for this. So that's like a constraint and it gets them to sort of think within bounds and think more carefully. A variation might be that students are presented with just the rhythmic pattern that they must adhere to and they have to come up with their own lyrics to fit it.

So it's a kind of creative exercise, engaging the creative energy there, which I think serves to deepen understanding still. Like when you have to come up with your own thing you really have to engage with the concept. It tests your understanding and of how especially phrases and word combinations map to these rhythms.

And then another variation would be you just give them one word give them a two or three syllable word, something like “banana,” something like the word “intricate,” or “tomato,” or “forget,” or “connect” or “below,” like words that have these different poetic feet or stress patterns and then have them repeat the word, repeat the singular word, in such a way implementing risks or whatever that again matches these patterns that you give them.

So that would challenge them to not just do things in a rote learning way like they actually have to engage with how the stress pattern of the word works versus, you know, the, the accent pattern that you've given them and how these things can match up. Um, it's not, it's, it won't be straightforward, you know, they'll actually have to really think about that.

Yeah. It seems like that combination of the, the natural stress pattern of the word plus like whatever accent pattern you assign them could be a great way to get them to start feeling in their bodies, with their mouths, like what these different kinds of rhythmic figures and little polyrhythms can feel like as you rotate through them, especially, you know, if you're having them do it over some kind of 4/4 based-backbeat pattern.

Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yep. Absolutely.

As was hinted at earlier when we talked about your first video that went viral, another topic that you’ve spent a good amount of time with is microtiming, which is this rhythmic technique that is ubiquitous across large swaths of music, including hip hop, but that can be especially challenging for us to quantify in grid-based systems, which is what most of our students have been trained in, right? They’re trained to like, to adhere to these rhythms that are notated on this strict grid. Can you talk a bit about how you've explained and demonstrated microtiming?

Yeah, so I like to talk, I love to use hip-hop for this example, by the way, because it's full of that. So a producer called J Dilla that a lot of people might or might not be familiar with, he popularized the displacement of the hi-hat relative to the snare. He would have a slightly early snare, slightly late hi-hat, a slightly late bass line with his beats, and it would create this wavy kind of lazy effect. And people sort of got familiar with that and it actually became known as the “J Dilla effect.”

But then what was less talked about was how these things appear or materialize in rap flow as well, how you can have a completely on-grid beat, but achieve this wavy effect by just delaying your rap flow or just creating slight accelerations and decelerations, kind of a rubato of the rap flow, which is like a real conversational, wavy style. And a lot of rappers intuitively do this, so framing that as a kind of microtiming thing is useful to help people understand the difference between two different kind of rhythms.

So one example or two examples that I love to use, the first one, “Johnny P’s Caddy” by Benny the Butcher. I'll play that for you right now. Pay attention to his rap flow and where his syllables are landing with respect to the drums and the implied grid. And then you'll hear, you'll really hear what's going on.

[clip from “Johnny P’s Caddy” plays]

So you can hear this, you can almost hear this implied rhythm there that he's kind of negotiating with, that he's kind of, you know, what he's doing, he's having a conversation not only with the listener but with the beat. There's this implied rhythm that, you know, we kind of want him to snap to but he's refusing to do that. So that's the kind of interesting way to frame it. Another example is the song “Blow Ya Trumpet” by Swindle featuring a few other rappers. I'll play that really quickly. Again, pay attention to the lateness.

[clip from “Blow Ya Trumpet” plays]

Especially that, “who wants smoke? I roll it.” Like that was phenomenally late, but you can hear how it was actually like a quantized implication, your implicated rhythm. Right.

Yeah, it's like, it's both behind, but it's also so snappy. Right. Whereas the Benny the Butcher is like, that's more the sound that I associate with microtiming, that sort of conversational feel. But that, that Swindle example.

Yeah, it's interesting. It's almost as if he's just taken his vocal and he's just moved it back relative to the, relative to the beat, which is cool. But yeah, so like in, in my work to sort of drive this home, what I'll do is I'll create like phrases that I rap where like, I'll directly juxtapose what it sounds like to be completely, you know, in time, on grid, rigidly with a more microtimed delivery so students can really understand. And I find that these are exceptionally effective at getting people to understand the difference. So I'll play one of these examples for you right now, a quite an obvious one.

[clip from one of Mazbou Q’s videos plays: With straight flows, everything precisely in time, every syllable a note nicely on a grid line. Microtiming is more like a wavy flow. The syllables are off grid. Delivery is way more conversational. With straight flows, everything precisely in time, every syllable a note nicely on a grid line. Microtiming is more like a wavy flow. The syllables are off grid. Delivery is way more conversational.]

And again, this one is accompanied by some visual, sort of visual aids as well to show people, you know, where the microtiming is happening, where the, but I mean, you can hear it, right? You can hear.

Yeah, I can definitely hear it. And I think another thing that I like about this example is that both halves, you know, both the straight flow and the microtimed flow, both sound really good. And so it's also a way of showing that like they're both good techniques. You just need to know, you know, within yourself as an artist, when to choose which type of thing, you know, it's not that one is better or, or anything. It's just, you know, they're, they're choices, but you need to have the skills to know when to make which choice and which flow is going to be better for whatever kind of track you're trying to make.

Yeah, exactly. And you know, sometimes I mean, this is probably more sort of a composition or even a pop music class thing, but sometimes I like to start conversations around the two techniques. I ask, I might ask a question like “which one is better?” and you know students would come back and be like, “oh, you know I prefer this one or this one,” and then but some other students might be like, “hey I like the straight flow for something like a chorus, but the verse I think, you know, the microtimed is good because the verse is where the main content and the main lyrical content and the message is. But the chorus is where you know, they want to be hooked in.” And so again that sort of brings in the function element to it.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah I think there's a lot of great conversations to be had there and then that can lead to an entire discussion on song form and like why that straight flow for instance might help build that like energy and tightness that you would want out of a chorus.

Another thing that strikes me with this topic is just how subtle and advanced of a technique microtiming can be. Because as you showed in both your examples and then in your little demonstration, if someone is doing it really well and at a high level, it sounds very natural and very conversational and sounds almost effortless. Whereas I know that if I tried it, right, I think I would just sound out of time. I think the best I could hope for personally as a rapper would just be to stay on the beat. And if I tried to do anything like microtiming, it would just end up sounding like I had gotten the rhythms wrong. So how do you work with students on this very advanced skill?

Yeah, I mean, as you say, it is advanced and nuanced and a lot of students would probably not be able to pick it up within a couple of lessons in terms of being able to reproduce it. So I like to focus on the oral side and provide an example of a microtimed flow and ask the students to think about what would the implied rhythm be here, the implied quantized rhythm. Think carefully about what rhythm they're kind of alluding to and then have the students perhaps transcribe what they think the implied rhythm is and then we can have a discussion around that.

And perhaps, you know, there's an opportunity to actually get them to start reproducing it at a very basic level. Just use a simple like string of eighth notes or string of quarter notes and get them to try and just you know, snap or say words or whatever, vocalize things slightly behind where the metronome is to get them to really get a feel for how they might start to practice it. But I think the more important thing is like the implied rhythm and being able to recognize that.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think this would be a great place to have, like, as you said, a transcription exercise where they're either taking that microtimed flow and turning it into a quantized flow, or you could even do something where, like, you ask them to try to transcribe the microtimed flow, you know, as is, which could sort of lead to a conversation about, like, what the limits of our notational systems are.

Yeah, true.

So that could be another direction to take it. Another thing that's come up frequently in your videos is swing, which I know some of your commenters online use as an umbrella term to encompass things like microtiming. But you've spent a good amount of time also just explaining swing and different variations on swing. Could you go into that a bit?

Yeah, so I mean, as you say, a lot of it's very popular among producers and rappers to use the term “swing” to just talk about anything where the grid is being forsaken, so to speak. But to be honest, I try not to be too stringent on terminology. But I do think there is a usefulness in making a distinction here just because what we traditionally know as swing has a particular phenomenon. And that phenomenon shows up in rap and it's useful to be like hey well this actually kind of sounds quite different from what microtiming is.

So I talk about swing as the backward displacement of the offbeat or the minor subdivisions and how that displacement can be is usually quite consistent and how it can be at varying degrees and create sort of varying extremities of swing and I give examples of that showing up in rap flow. So the chief example I use is this song by Rakim called “It's Been a Long Time” and I'll play that for you now and just pay attention to his rap flow.

[clip from “It’s Been a Long Time” plays]

So I mean, you can hear a little bit of sort of general microtiming there, like staying a bit behind the beat, but the main feature of this rap flow, I argue, is the [snapping and scatting the rhythm] bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop, that real sort of backward displacement of the off-beat, which gives it that particular flavour, which without that, the essence of it is gone.

So when I talk about it like that, I think the students start to really be like, oh, okay, yep, I get it. They, again, start making connections to the music that they've heard. A lot of them are like, oh, yes, no, no, no, this is the technique that this uses. I heard this saxophone piece or this drum piece. So they really start to understand what the features of swing is and how it differs from microtiming.

And then I sort of I like to move on to an example of one of my works where I take over across a four or five bar section I progressively move from a state of negative swing so like the forward displacement of the of the offbeat I progressively move from there to a more extreme backward displacement. So I'll play that for you now and sort of explain what I what I tell the students to listen for.

[clip from Mazbou Q’s “Cryptography” plays]

Now it is quite a subtle technique, or a subtle way of sort of demonstrating it that I've employed here. But I tell them to sort of listen out at the start. You can hear this [snapping and scatting] da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da, which is that kind of Scotch Snap or Lombard rhythm that’s showing up, and then towards the middle you can hear it kind of even out [snapping and scatting] da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da and then towards the end [snapping and scatting] da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da, right? Coming more into the traditional swing. So that sort of progressively happens. That shows them literally like the swing thing is a bit of a sliding scale, rather than it being like a discrete on or off thing.

Yeah, and I feel like that video is also one where the visuals really, really help a lot as you sort of guide the listener through what you're demonstrating. I also feel like this is a good place where you could make that connection with the Scotch Snap or the Lombard rhythm and talk about like, you know, whether this kind of negative swing, as you call it sometimes, and the Scotch snap are exactly the same thing or very closely related or if, you know, each term is really more, it's more about like what repertoire it's being used in. Yeah, I don't know if you have any thoughts on that.

Yeah. I mean, I'd say like, so I've heard negative swing, reverse swing, Scotch snap, Lombard rhythm, used interchangeably. I guess, from my perspective, I just use those sort of named terms to describe the more obvious and extreme instances of that effect where it's really like [snapping and scatting], as opposed to [snapping and scatting], which is like close to even, but still a little bit negative swing. So like the, I guess the idea of negative swing being used as more of a measure is good whereas Scotch snap and Lombard rhythm describe a phenomenon, more like a real, you know, distinct phenomenon.

Yeah, kind of a difference in degree also rather than kind, maybe.

Well, it’s about time to wrap things up. Maz, I want to thank you so much for this whole conversation, and for everything you’ve been doing for hip hop education. Right now, it's not all that common for hip hop to be used in music theory and aural skills classrooms. Why do you think it’s important for students to be exposed to this music and the theory that's relevant to it?

Yeah, I mean, I think like I guess when it comes down to it, hip hop is the most listened to genre of music among young people in the Western world. So being able to connect these concepts with the music that they know and love and that they are already engaged with, you know what I'm saying? We don't have to convince them to engage with this kind of music first. They already know and love it. So to be able to bring these concepts into their world, I think it just deepens and accelerates their understanding. It gets them more passionate about it. They start listening to music more intentionally and they're more readily going to incorporate it in their own stuff. So I think it's just a way of making the study of music more potent for these young people.

And the second thing I'd say, which is more of a socio-political point, which is hip hop should be in classrooms, just like any other sort of music. I mean, it used to be the case that something like jazz music, they didn't analyze it. It wasn't analyzed because it was thought of as this kind of bastardized thing. Unfortunately, there are these comments around hip hop being not real music or it's not really well thought out or anything like that.

It's just, you know, people of color doing whatever, which is, and so like kind of highlighting, actually, no, like there are all these very complex and nuanced techniques there. I think it challenges those, quite frankly, racist notions, right? And it sort of makes people understand, oh, ok, no, like this is quite intense in music. It's an art unto itself and it should have that respect and should be learned. Like we shouldn't need, we shouldn't need to analyze it within a Western music framework. But, you know, that's kind of how it is. And I think, yeah, I just think hip hop does deserve that kind of spotlight on it.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think I personally look at it, like as you said, as both a matter of justice and a matter of engagement and telling students, the many, many students who love this music, that their interest is valuable and there are plenty of really interesting things to think about with this music. And at the same time, for any students who aren't as interested or explicitly motivated by hip hop itself, that a lot of the skills that you can learn from it are also transferable to other kinds of music as well. And I think just including it more is just going to make even more music learning possible for all of our students.

A hundred percent.

Thank you so much again for joining me for this conversation today. We've covered a good amount of ground, but I know that you cover a lot of other topics in your work ranging from everything like fundamentals of oral recognition of meter all the way to really complex and more advanced topics like polyrhythm. Where can people find out more about your work?

Yeah, so I'm on all the main social medias like YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, or X as they call it, and it's just those domains, forward slash MazbouQ, M-A-Z-B-O-U-Q. So I've got a lot of videos there sort of in short form, some a couple of long form stuff as well on YouTube, just going through these concepts, breaking down popular artists, which is really exciting for a lot of young people. And then also on my website MazbouQ.com I do have a couple of courses or course units where I go through the stuff in depth. It is more of a kind of a pedagogical or like a classroom sort of approach where I do provide exercises so they can be kind of structured learning and it can aid in the classroom but it is designed for people who don't necessarily have a formal music training.

Great. Everybody, go follow Mazbou Q and don't hesitate to reach out to either of us if you have any questions. That's all for now. Bye.

See you later.

Maz and I would like to thank all the editors and staff at SMT Pod for providing such a seamless and supportive process. We’d especially like to thank our team lead Jennifer Weaver, peer reviewers Danny Jenkins and Leah Frederick, and producer Jose Garza.

[Outro Theme by Yike Zhang.]

Visit our website, smt-pod.org, for supplemental materials related to this episode and to learn how to submit an episode proposal. And join in the conversation by tweeting us your questions and comments @SMT_Pod. SMT-Pod’s theme music was written by Maria Tartaglia, with closing music by Yike Zhang.