🎨Rap is Art
Abstract
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.
Full Paper
Exhibits Part 1 — Audio Visuals
Canvas — Pillars — Soundscape
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.
Virtual pillars are placed in the space containing videos of hip-hop pioneers such as Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash, symbolizing the foundation of the rap genre. As a user approaches each pillar, the video's sound is spatialized, accompanied by a visual display of the song's lyrics projected into the virtual environment.
While conceptualizing and fulfilling the creation of this experience, I was greatly inspired by the history, purpose, and practice of soundscape composition and composers of the genre. To express my gratitude and appreciation for their efforts, a portion of the space was dedicated one particular composer, Hildegard Westerkamp, to display one of her aural artworks "Beneath the Rain Forest"
Exhibits Part 2 — Interface
Comparisons — Search — Nodes
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.
Dynamic searching of terms to explore themes and similar topic in songs.
LRC (Lyrics Synchronization File) Parser
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.
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