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Cyber Ear / Cypher Ear, a System for Automatically Appreciating Off-the-Top Rap

Two rappers engaged in a battle rap in the middle of the empty stadium stage
AI image created by Adobe Stock user tong2530

We describe Cyber Ear / Cypher Ear, CE/CE (pronounced “Ceecee”) for short, a system for automatically evaluating improvisational, responsive rap in real time. By explicitly modeling freestyle rap appreciation, the system allows us to learn more about different aspects of this type of rap, including which ones are hard to formalize and which ones are more easily modeled computationally. Thus, this system allows us to formulate a novel theory of rap appreciation, and explore how it relies on semantic, phonetic, and lexical connections. One of the significant and difficult aspects of this type of rap is semantic connection. We compare different techniques for assessing the semantic aspects of improvisational rap and provide a preliminary assessment of these methods. We find that WordNet appears to work the best in our current implementation.

From the Proceedings of the 16th Conference on Creativity & Cognition

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Written by
Daniel Villagran
Nick Montfort
Written by
Nick Montfort

Nick Montfort, professor of digital media, uses computation to develop literary art. His work includes more than ten computer-generated print books (from seven presses), the collaborations The Deletionist and Sea and Spar Between, and Memory Slam: Batch-Era Text Generation. His most recent book of poetry is human-authored but written under constraint: All the Way for the Win (Penteract Press, 2025) consists entirely of three-letter words. Among Montfort’s MIT Press books are The Future and two co-edited volumes, The New Media Reader and Output: An Anthology of Computer-Generated Text, 1953–2023. He’s also principal investigator in the University of Bergen’s Center for Digital Narrative. He directs a lab/studio, The Trope Tank. For more, see Nick’s site, nickm.com.

Wasalu Jaco
Written by
Wasalu Jaco

Wasalu Jaco, professionally known as Lupe Fiasco, is a Chicago-born, Grammy award-winning American rapper, record producer, entrepreneur, and community advocate. Rising to fame in 2006, following the success of his debut album Food & Liquor, Lupe has released eight acclaimed studio albums, his latest being Drill Music In Zion, released in June 2022. His efforts to propagate conscious material garnered recognition as a Henry Crown Fellow, and he is a recipient of an MLK Visiting Professorship at MIT for the 2022/2023 academic year.

Avatar Written by Daniel Villagran
Nick Montfort Written by Nick Montfort
Wasalu Jaco Written by Wasalu Jaco