Find words and combinations of words that can be spoken the quickest

Question

I'm a big fan of discovering sentences that can be rapped very quickly. For example, "gotta read a little bit of Wikipedia" or "don't wanna wind up in the gutter with a bottle of malt." (George Watsky)

I wanted to write a program in Python that would enable me to find words (or combinations of words) that can be articulated such that it sounds very fast when spoken.

I initially thought that words that had a high syllable to letter ratio would be the best, but upon writing a Python program to do find those words, I retrieved only very simple words that didn't really sound fast (e.g. "iowa").

So I'm at a loss at what actually makes words sound fast. Is it the morpheme to letter ratio? Is it the number of alternating vowel-consonant pairs?

How would you guys go about devising a python program to resolve this problem?

Whalen

Hehe, nice question, but unfortunately I have no clue how to answer it :( My only observation is that those and similar sentences have a high ratio of the letters ptkbdgw and the th. But I guess it's equally important how those are distributed over the sentence.. – Acridine

What about trying to ask your question here: linguistics.stackexchange.com It's not as active as stackoverflow but you might get a better answer there. Once you get the algorithm, we can help you with the Python code :) – Botulinus

This is a pretty cool question. While I certainly don't have an answer to this, off the top of my head I would maybe assume that words with more syllables at the end might be easier to rap quickly overall. However, it seems as though Busta Rhymes can rap anything at the speed of light. A good starting point as Julien Bourdon pointed out above would be to delve into linguistics for this one. I'll keep my eye out on this though because I'd like to know. – Oshinski

writing software to help you rap? this is taking gangsta to a whole new level! – Superorganic

I would write down a list of rhymes that you have come up with already and study those for any patterns. It's possible that certain vowels work better with certain consonants. Also, you must realize that the English language has a very loose set of spelling rules, so you should go by the phrases phonemes, and not by the way they are spelled. – Calandra

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patter_song might be a source of examples - with Gilbert and Sullivan you could compare the words in patter songs with those used elsewhere – Davison

Hmmm... after a little thought, it would seem that consonants that have points of articulation that are close together would be easier to say in succession. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Place_of_articulation – Calandra

Answer 1

This is just a stab in the dark as I'm not a linguist (although, I have written a voice synthesizer), the metric that be useful here is the number of phonemes that make up each word, since the phonemes themselves are going to be the same approximate duration regardless of use. There's an International Phonetic Alphabet chart for english dialects, as well as a nice phonology of English.

A good open-source phonetic dictionary is available from the cmudict project which has about 130k words

Here's a really quick stab at a look up program:

#!/usr/bin/python

import re

words={}

for line in open("cmudict.0.7a",'ro').readlines():
    split_idx = line.find(' ')
    words[line[0:split_idx]] = line[split_idx+1:-1]

user_input = raw_input("Words: ")

print
for word in user_input.split(' '):
    try:
        print "%25s %s" % (word, words[word.upper()])
    except:
        print "%25s %s" % (word, 'unable to find phonems for word')

When run..

Words: I support hip hop from the underground up

                    I  AY1
              support  S AH0 P AO1 R T
                  hip  HH IH1 P
                  hop  HH AA1 P
                 from  F R AH1 M
                  the  DH AH0
          underground  AH1 N D ER0 G R AW2 N D
                   up  AH1 P

If you want to get super fancy pants about this, there's always the Python Natural Language Toolkit which may have some useful tidbits for you.

Additionally, some real world use.. although to be fair, I fixed 'stylin' to 'styling'.. But left 'tellin' to reveal the deficiency of unknown words.. You could probably try a lookup for words ending with in' by subbing the g in for the apostrophe and then drop the NG phoneme from the lookup..

                  Yes  Y EH1 S
                  the  DH AH0
               rhythm  R IH1 DH AH0 M
                  the  DH AH0
                rebel  R EH1 B AH0 L
              Without  W IH0 TH AW1 T
                    a  AH0
                pause  P AO1 Z
                  I'm  AY1 M
             lowering  L OW1 ER0 IH0 NG
                   my  M AY1
                level  L EH1 V AH0 L
                  The  DH AH0
                 hard  HH AA1 R D
               rhymer  R AY1 M ER0
                where  W EH1 R
                  you  Y UW1
                never  N EH1 V ER0
                 been  B IH1 N
                  I'm  AY1 M
                   in  IH0 N
                  You  Y UW1
                 want  W AA1 N T
              styling  S T AY1 L IH0 NG
                  you  Y UW1
                 know  N OW1
                 it's  IH1 T S
                 time  T AY1 M
                again  AH0 G EH1 N
                    D  D IY1
                  the  DH AH0
                enemy  EH1 N AH0 M IY0
               tellin unable to find phonems for word
                  you  Y UW1
                   to  T UW1
                 hear  HH IY1 R
                   it  IH1 T
                 They  DH EY1
              praised  P R EY1 Z D
              etc...

If this is something you plan on putting some time into, I'd be interested in helping. I think putting 'Worlds first rapping IDE' on my resume would be hilarious. And if one exists already, world's first Python based rapping IDE. :p

Radioscope

Or, world's freshest rapping IDE! – Acridine

Brilliant! @Patel, I'm going to be working on this for quite a long time, as it interests me, so I will contact you for any assistance! – Whalen

I can think of a couple things like bringing in rhyming dictionary and thesaurus (hopefully open source versions exist). I'm definitely curious to see what you make of it - so please do contact me or post on a blog.. The internet needs more rap based algorithm projects! – Radioscope

For what it's worth - I ran across a rhyme utility that also uses cmudict.. sourceforge.net/projects/rhyme/files – Radioscope

For bonus points, steal the TomTom GPS Snoop Dogg voice.. youtube.com/watch?v=Kgjy-k5mOqA – Radioscope

Answer 2

I would say it's a good idea to start by taking the examples you gave or other ones you like and doing some sort of analysis for all your ideas on them: e.g. phoneme to to letter ratio, etc; whatever sounds reasonable and that you can calculate. The more samples the better. Hopefully this will give you a good idea of what properties the lines and words you already enjoy share, which should lead you in the right direction.

Otherwise, my laymen's guess is that short vowels (obviously) and hard consonants like 't', some 'p's, hard 'g's, etc, will be best - they make the lines sound staccato and rapid-fire.

(wanted to leave this as a comment cause it's not really an answer, but it's too long :)

Hindbrain