đ¨Rap is Art
Last updated
Last updated
This paper explores the integration of rap music, an auditory art form conveying powerful sociopolitical commentary, into visual arts spaces to create immersive multimedia experiences. A virtual museum was developed in Unity, spatializing music from prominent rap artists to amplify their messages. Interactions allow users to visualize lyrics and access sources linked to deeper analysis. Parallels are drawn to soundscape composition techniques and the World Soundscape Project's exploration of acoustic ecology. Goals include highlighting lyrical depth in rap by extracting and projecting vocal and song lyrics, uniting visual and auditory arts through an inclusive museum space, and providing an innovative template for future virtual experiences. This paper argues that rap music deserves recognition as impactful artistic expression, not just mere entertainment, containing deeper meaning beyond its aural perspective. It concludes that embracing rap music in cultural institutions and virtual interactive experiences can increase accessibility and awareness, foster dialogue about social justice, identity, and empowerment, and resonate with more diverse audiences.
Mode 1 is a demonstration of displaying graphics of artists and lyrics as art itself. Mode 2 transforms the canvases into video displays containing various music videos.
This interface provides an innovative way of viewing comparisons for each song, highlighting similarities and differences in themes, lyrics, storytelling, delivery, and production. It also provides a unique dual music player for viewing synchronized lyrics.
Scrubbing and seeking is constrained to individual lyric lines to preserve the clarity of each statement. There is also the option to isolate vocals for acapella playback.
I created a custom parser for Unity to extract audio track metadata and timestamps for each lyric line. A script was also created to import all .lrc files into Unity as .txt for ease of use. During the parsing of each file, a Scriptable Object is created, structuring its content into a custom SongData class. A few additions were added to the class such as annotations, album art, and audio clip.
