Listener’s delight: the sensory feast of rap music

When asked how rap music makes you feel, a few things probably come to mind. You might remember your heart rate rising or your mind speeding up against the rapid beat. Whether it’s at a concert among the wild crowd or alone in your room, your brain and body match the music’s energy and fall into tempo, finding simultaneous ease and excitement in the rhythm without a second thought. 

Rap music is an unmatched, incredibly influential behemoth whose rise over the past few decades has been a major driving force for transformation within the music industry. Rap’s lyrics range from glorifications of violence to long-form, honest narratives about the hardships of life. Yet, putting aside the music’s content for a moment, there is something appealing about rap that is unlike any other genre of music, and it is entirely sensory: rap music exploits people’s natural inclination towards pleasing sounds and rhythms to synthesize incredibly indulgent music. As such, a well-produced rap song makes use of the range of sounds at their disposal to build layered and creative music that you can feel just as much as you can hear. When we trace artists’ exploration with beats, a history of sound evolution emerges that propels us into the future of rap music with frenetic, insistent energy. 

Chance the Rapper

Rap was born at New York City block parties in the 1970s when MCs began using percussive breaks in soul, funk, and disco songs to rhyme over the beat and hype up the crowd. Everyone from DJs to teenagers took the idea and ran; rap’s first commercial success took the form of The Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” with a funk bassline, electric guitar spotlight, and rolling melody. Following this pioneering song, rap music became a compelling new American soundtrack. From record-scratching to 808s, rap took on many era-defining sounds throughout the decades and fully embraced a gradual yet persistent transition from traditional instrumentation, including acoustic drums, electric guitar, and bass to synthesizers, loops, and drum machines. This transformation came to a head in the 21st century as rap lost its era-based, technology-defined sound and became much more experimental and diverse in the age of accessible sound. Moving from the gritty, aggressive identity of Run-DMC or Tupac’s laid-back groove to the eclectic discographies of today’s rappers and countless musical subgenres, rap has traded in its straightforwardness to become an endless sound experiment. Its continued success proves that the sounds of rap have an inherent appeal within the musical experience that is deeply tied with the listener’s physiological response to sound.

Music is a sensory experience, and just like any other sense, the human brain receives and processes sound as sensory information. Different neurons within the auditory cortex that respond to different frequencies and sound qualities are what make hearing a sound a full-bodied experience. Attributing sounds to certain sources, associating it with certain events, and most significantly, deriving emotional meaning are all part of the auditory process. People develop certain physical and emotional responses to specific sounds through conditioning and repetition; sirens make us alert, where a buzzing fly might make us irritated. Processing music is a more complex function of the brain, but it has a similar relationship with sound conditioning. For example, the Eagles music that I heard growing up might be what makes me gravitate towards melodic guitar now. Rap music borrows a little bit from both phenomenons; it carries rhythmic and melodic content that satiates our desire for harmony, and modern rap goes even further to preserve raw sounds and our emotional reactions to them because production technology allows us to isolate sounds before combining them into music. 

Today, sound editing is a staple in the music production process that has evolved to fit our sensory curiosity. Where producers once needed live bands to record, samples, synthesizers, and drum machines now dominate the studio. A beat must be built from the ground up: first, maybe a sample, then a chord progression followed by kicks, bass, embellishments, and so on. This not only deconstructs the process by finding the musicality that exists within each sound, but further pushes artists to draw connections between everyday sounds and emotions. To layer and mix, traverse high and low pitches, and ultimately give the music body, is to build a bustling landscape of sound that completely immerses the listener. In contrast, songs that seem to abuse these subtleties bring about unpleasant feelings and sensations, but regardless they demonstrate how deeply music controls our emotional state. 

Well-made rap capitalizes on our love affair with sound using a few outstanding techniques.     

One element that is essential to any good rap song is repetition. Rhythm is defined by repetition, and the human ear is instinctively drawn to the reliability of patterns. Rap emphasizes rhythmic drive and complexity over melodic content, so it often looks to patterns that subvert expectations to create flow and movement within the music. This can be as simple as the highly influential backbeat, which accents the weak beats of a measure, or as complex as samba rhythms. Establishing a consistent meter gives the impression of freed-up space within the beat to layer more rhythms and bring in a variety of textures as the song develops. 

Producers tend to get the most creative with augmenting sound itself, which has proven to have unlimited capabilities in the modern era. This can encompass everything from choosing instrumentation to sampling and autotune. In one example, J. Cole’s “No Role Modelz” slyly uses the sound of birds chirping as a bright hi-hat to offset the song’s pounding kick. Before delving into a funk groove overlaid with nuanced metaphors, Kendrick Lamar’s “These Walls” opens with a saxophone wail that’s evocative of a woman crying. Here he draws on jazz history, in which acoustic instruments are often used to mimic human voices and speech patterns, to blur the line between music and speech. Rap musicians that take extra creative liberties with sound repurpose given information in new contexts; they connect music with sounds and their pre-existing connotations in the same way that artists allude to famous works of the past to reinvent its themes.

Photo of Tyler, the Creator and A$AP Rocky by Angela Weiss via Getty Images

These elements all contribute to the finished product, where effective layering, harmonization, and rhythmic clarity can turn sounds into satisfying music. A prime example is Tyler, The Creator’s “Who Dat Boy” which boldly exploits classic movie score techniques to create the sinister and foreboding atmosphere of a horror movie. This song displays the delicate balancing act of compatible sound and rhythm as it employs many distorted sound effects and unpredictable rhythms that are meant to unsettle the listener. By choosing sound textures that complement and nuance one another and prioritizing a steady, moving pulse, the song reaffirms its musicality. “Who Dat Boy” stretches the limitations of music while showcasing what rap production does at its best: like processed foods full of sugar, it isolates and repurposes the most indulgent parts of sounds to get you hooked with an addictive rush of emotion.

Rap music is a statement. Its colossal presence incites popular culture, and people are drawn to its restless nature, but the politics of rap are only half the appeal. The best rap music today takes risks with the goal of reimagining, stimulating, and manipulating the senses to create infectious energy. Production technology, in a series of maneuvers with sound, rhythm, and layering does the dirty work that unconsciously sets our emotions into overdrive whenever we listen to rap as it lifts our mood and brings back memories. Behind it all is an important yet often overlooked understanding of how the auditory sense controls our physical state; producers choose a sound based on how it makes them feel, an instinct that’s often inexplicable but impossible to ignore. Unique among musicians in that they orchestrate entirely with isolated sounds and rhythms, their construction process speaks to rap as a sensory feast behind its attention-grabbing lyrics and personas. The limits of rap extend only as far as you can feel, lending it to creativity, accessibility, and growth. Cited as the music genre whose experimental spirit defines our generation, we can rest easy knowing that the future of music is open-ended yet ever delightful. 

Written by Anna Linn