Conference Agenda

This session on timbre, texture, and space in hip-hop music features three papers that converge on the analysis of this genre’s compositional and production practices. In so doing, the session attends to two recent proliferations in music theory scholarship: increased focus on hip-hop music and its subgenres, and greater engagement with timbre, texture, and sound spatialization. Testament to these proliferations is the creation of SMT’s two newest interest groups: rap and hip-hop music, and timbre and orchestration. Among hip-hop music’s primary compositional parameters, timbre, texture, and sound spatialization are essential to beat making, studio production, and flow vocalizing, and are intricately tied to issues of identity, class, technology, and race. Abundant extant work explores these topics, including outputs by Rose (1994), Schloss (2004), Sewell (2014), McLeish (2020), and Campbell (2022) that explore how hip hop’s embrace of various technologies uses sound (both timbre and texture) to create, affirm, subvert, and challenge aspects of racial identity.

Building on momentum created by the above scholarship, this session’s three papers explore compositional, performative, and production practices that have either arisen through hip-hop music or have become synonymous with it in some way. Kelsey Lussier proposes a new model for analyzing texture in hip-hop music based on the reorganization and expansion of the functional layer system developed by Moore (2012) and furthered by Lavengood (2020). Ben Duinker explores timbral heterogeneity and complex approaches to sound spatialization in trap music, drawing on Olly Wilson’s 1992 essay “The Heterogeneous Sound Ideal in African American Music.” And Philipp Elssner focuses on sampling practice, specifically how the spatialization of sounds in sampled records is either preserved or modified in their repurposed contexts.

The textural role and spatial distribution of timbral heterogeneity emerges as a central thread among the papers in this session. Given the ever-increasing impact of hip-hop music on the wider popular music landscape, this session is testament to the need for increased analytical attention on matters of texture and timbre in this genre, with a mind for further exploring how it intersects important technological, sociological, and musicological dimensions.

This paper proposes a new model for analyzing hip hop textures, based on the reorganization, reconceptualization, and expansion of Allan Moore’s (2012) functional layer theory and Megan Lavengood’s (2020) novelty layer (further developing Moore’s theory). Two particularities of hip-hop music prompt this new model. First, several of hip hop’s compositional norms contradict or exceed the scope of Moore’s textural functions. For instance, his definition of the melodic layer as a song’s “tune” does not account for rapped lyric delivery (flow), which tends to foreground rhythmic and timbral elements. Moreover, whereas Moore’s primary rhythmic layer focuses on the drum kit, hip-hop beats’ rhythmic surfaces combine percussive sounds with pitched elements such as sampled riffs, melodies, and harmonic gestures. Since Moore’s theory is designed to describe pop and rock textures, his model does not capture the integration of these elements in a hip-hop beat.

Second, timbral contrast and resistance to homogeneous blending permeates all textural layers in hip-hop tracks, a product of the common practice of sampling from a variety of genres. This characteristic exemplifies Olly Wilson’s “heterogeneous sound ideal” (1992), which he describes as a primary aesthetic principle of African and Afrodiasporic music: the simultaneous and/or successive juxtaposition of multiple contrasting timbres. Lavengood’s novelty-layer theory identifies within a song a single timbre that is contextually and aurally marked and resists blending with the ensemble and is therefore incongruous with hip hop’s textural and timbral aesthetics, where non-blending is normalized and thus unmarked.

My model takes these idiomatic features of hip-hop music as starting points, proposing three groups: a lead and augmentation group, a novelty group, and a beat group, thereby creating space for flow, integrating pitched and unpitched elements in the beat, and aligning the novelty function with the heterogeneous sound ideal. This new model, which foregrounds the compositional practices and stylistic norms, therefore more adequately describes hip hop textures.

Olly Wilson’s essay “The Heterogeneous Sound Ideal in African American Music” (1992) describes aspects of timbral heterogeneity that its author argues are central to African and Afrodiasporic musical traditions. In this paper I identify sites of Wilson’s heterogeneous sound ideal in the timbral, textural, and spatial realms of trap music, a genre that grew out of 2000s hip hop.

Wilson’s heterogeneous sound ideal involves “the [heterogeneous] relationship of the resultant qualities of sound produced when several instruments perform simultaneously” (160). Trap music achieves such heterogeneous relationships through several contrasting sound layers: a deep, unfocused-sounding bass layer comprising kick drum and synth bass; a synthesized or sampled melodic/harmonic layer that is typically mixed to sound distant; a rhythmic layer featuring crisp percussive sounds; and one or more vocal layers (which may also be melodic) of varying functionality. It also involves “the common usage of a wide range of timbres within a single line” (160). This context encompasses situations where multiple timbres share a line or pass the line back and forth. In many trap beats, the synth bass and kick drum often share a single line, where the kick (usually sampled from the Roland TR-808) involves a pitch tail that fuses sonically with the synth bass or is the bass. The back-and-forth passing of a line between divergent timbres can occur in trap vocals, where multiple voices—usually technologically mediated—sound in fragmented succession.

Wilson includes the heterogeneous sound ideal in his list of practices that “collectively form the essence of Black music” (159), among which a third is relevant to trap music: “the tendency . . . to fill up all the musical [temporal] space” (159). In trap music, this “filling up” can also occur spatially, via technology used by trap producers and studio engineers. Supported by musical examples and extant testimonial from producers and MCs, I illustrate how Wilson’s heterogeneous sound ideal represents a through line in hip-hop music that has culminated in trap—a genre whose sound world increasingly permeates all corners of mainstream popular music.

Since the beginnings of commercially recorded hip-hop music, beat producers have sampled songs from funk, R&B, and soul—genres known for their use of wide stereo mixes. When sampling such songs, producers must decide whether to retain the wide stereo mix from the original song, or to spatially recontextualize the sample within their new song. In this paper I propose that the way sampled material is spatially recontextualized exemplifies aesthetic goals of hip-hop and how they differ from the genre’s primary stylistic antecedents. Furthermore, I argue that producers harness variation in spatialization to create formal contrast between different song sections. I categorize samples using Sewell’s (2014) typology and describe the virtual space heard in recorded songs using Dockwray and Moore’s (2010) sound-box model. I also demonstrate how the recontextualization of a sample’s spatialization can change the listener’s embodied response to the “same” musical material, using theories of musical embodiment developed by Cox (2011) and Godøy and Leaman (2009).

1990s producers often created beats using long samples from disco and R&B hits, such as Sean Combs sampling Diana Ross’s “I’m Coming Out” (1980) for The Notorious B.I.G.’s “Mo Money Mo Problems” (1997). The original spatialization in “I’m Coming Out” is constrained to the center of the stereo image in “Mo Money Mo Problems,” and the sampled instruments are heard behind the rapped vocals, exemplifying hip hop’s propensity to forefront the interaction between the vocals and the drums. By contrast, Kanye West’s 2005 song “Touch the Sky” (produced by Just Blaze) mostly retains the spatialization of its sample from Curtis Mayfield’s “Move on Up” (1970). In West’s song, however, the lower frequencies of the sample are boosted, leading to an overall downward shift in the sound-box and suggesting a change in our embodied experience as compared to the original song.

Through these and other examples I demonstrate how analyzing the use of space in hip-hop can illuminate the genre’s aesthetic goals, help us understand the embodied experience of listeners, and give us a greater appreciation for the art of sampling.