Visualizing the "Flow" of a Rapper

Name: Trenton J. Johnson

Number of Teammates Desired: 1 or 2

Description of Idea: This idea is a unique idea which attempts to visualize audio data in real-time, specifically audio data which represents a rapper rapping. Wikipedia defines "flow" as

"the rhythms and rhymes" of a hip-hop song's lyrics and how they interact – the book How to Rap breaks flow down into rhyme, rhyme schemes, and rhythm (also known as cadence). 'Flow' is also sometimes used to refer to elements of the delivery (pitch, timbre, volume) as well, though often a distinction is made between the flow and the delivery.

My hypothesis is that a rapper with more artistic use of the characteristics above will generally have a better 'flow.' So how to define 'artistic use'? I don't know exactly yet, but after I give this more thought, I will have to develop a algorithmic model of it and measure the rappers by it. This idea does not take into account the quality of the actual lyrical content because my (soon-to-be-developed) algorithm will probably not pick out specific words. Instead, it will only focus on how the lyrics sound. As such, it's theoretically possible for a rapper to have impeccable flow if they make a rap full of made-up words. This will only give insight into how sonically pleasing the rapper is. Oh yeah, so about visualization: my hope is that the display will have either standard dynamic bars and gauges which measure various parameters as the clip plays or the display will have a much more abstract formation of curves and lines which stretch and contort (similar to Windows Media Player visualizations) based on the flow of the clip. My hope is that I can come up with a way classifying quantitatively good rap performances and poor performances. It's like the DDR of hip hop. Hopefully this will match up with people's perceptions.

Description of Data: The size of data is not extremely large in this case (a typical audio file), but it can be reasonably unpredictable and has a temporal parameter associated with its processing.

Additional Information: Anyone who likes rap or hip hop may find this project interesting.