Hip-hop has always had an intimate relationship with technology, from the early days of DJs tinkering with turntables and building beats with 808 drum machines to the advent of Fruity Loops as a production software to the arrival of the Pro Tools plug-in Auto-Tune. And there have always been artists who rapped with all the charm of a computer churning out lyrics. But at the very least there was always a human involved in making the song. The computers themselves couldn’t rap. Until now.
As MIT Technology Review reports, researcher Eric Malmi, of Finland’s University of Aalto, has created an algorithm that teaches a computer to write its own rap lyrics. By analyzing the features of rap lines, the program, which is called DeepBeat, can take a rap line and generate a follow-up line that stays on the same subject and matches the rhyme pattern of the line before it. To do this, Malmi’s team plugged 10,000 rap songs by 100 different artists into a database and designed the algorithm to analyze features of the lines and scan for assonant rhymes (the rhyme style focused on vowels most common to hip-hop; i.e. “yo” rhymes with “bro”).
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Using that data, the researchers did a few things. First, they figured out how to rank raps based on “rhyming density,” which is an average of the length of rhyming vowel sequences in lyrics. By those standards, which particularly value multisyllabic rhymes, Inspectah Deck, Rakim, and the Finnish rapper Redrama were considered the densest rhymers (as noted by MIT Technology Review, Eminem, who is famous for his intricate rhyme schemes, ranked relatively low because the algorithm doesn’t account for the way he frequently bends rhymes).
The researchers also tested the algorithm by seeing how accurately it could predict the real next line of a rap song when given the first line. It succeeded 82 percent of the time.
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But most importantly, they had it write its own rap. To do this, DeepBeat started with a line from the database and then scanned through the database for another line that both rhymed and fit the subject matter. Then it would repeat the process based on the line it had pulled up. Et cetera. This is one of the raps it came up with, on the subject of love:
For a chance at romance I would love to enhance
But everything I love has turned to a tedious task
One day we gonna have to leave our love in the past
I love my fans but no one ever puts a grasp
I love you momma I love my momma – I love you momma
And I would love to have a thing like you on my team you take care
I love it when it’s sunny Sonny girl you could be my Cher
I’m in a love affair I can’t share it ain’t fair
Haha I’m just playin’ ladies you know I love you.
I know my love is true and I know you love me too
Girl I’m down for whatever cause my love is true
This one goes to my man old dirty one love we be swigging brew
My brother I love you Be encouraged man And just know
When you done let me know cause my love make you be like WHOA
If I can’t do it for the love then do it I won’t
All I know is I love you too much to walk away though
Pretty impressive! I know that computer is just playing, ladies! What a cad! What a CAD (just some topical computer humor for you)! One thing I’ve always said about computers is that they do it (computing/rapping) for the love, and if they can’t do it for the love, they quit. This is why computers crash. Just kidding! Computers are unfeeling monsters who will never know what love is, and that makes them rapping about it all the more terrifying.
Fortunately, this rap is less impressive when you consider that each of these lines was pulled from an existing rap song, where it presumably made more sense. What a fucking biter! If a real rapper pulled this they would be torn apart or sued.
But DeepBeat does have an ace in the hole: The researchers report that DeepBeat is better at rhyming than a human—“DeepBeat outperforms the top human rappers by 21 percent in terms of length and frequency of the rhymes in the produced lyrics,” they wrote—which would be great if rap were all about who can come up with the best rhymes. But in that world, Papoose would be the greatest rapper of all time and Young Thug would never exist. Which quite honestly sounds like a rap hellscape invented by evil scientists. Which is what we could be headed toward if this technology gets into the wrong hands. Let me reiterate: Computers have no feelings, and feelings are what makes music good.
So should we fear the arrival of our rapping computer overlords? At this point, they still need human input, so probably not. But should we fear a world in which they are writing all the raps? Yes, absolutely. That world would suck. Imagine listening to songs that are just an algorithmic approximation of turning up. Imagine songs that are developed by performing data analysis of socioeconomic conditions in a neighborhood and then using those data points to describe life there. Imagine songs that parse Instagram captions and plug them into a formula designed to approximate human emotion. Imagine, worst of all, a rogue computer that just starts writing raps on its own about its startup sequences and boot instructions. All of these things are well within the realm of possibility. We have the technology. But if there is one thing that science is in the process of teaching us, it’s that we can never pass the computer the mic.
Kyle Kramer wrote this on a computer. Follow him on Twitter.
