The Shape of Sound: Black Utopia & Higher Mathematics
Artist-scholar Stacey Robinson’s “cool down” iPad drawing of Rakim and Dr. Regina Bradley’s sit down with the legendary rapper represent both real and speculative aspects of blackness. At Harvard’s Hip-Hop Archive, Robinson, a current Nas Fellow, talked about ‘Building Black Utopia through Hiphop as a Black Speculative Technology’. A week later Dr. Bradley took the stage with Rakim at the Auburn Avenue Research Library in Atlanta to talk about Sweat the Technique: Revelations on Creativity from the Lyrical Genius.
While at Harvard, Robinson will create a body of work based on hip-hop samples. At the colloquium, he noted the phenomenon of the Great Black Migration when the ancestors came up north from the south, bringing with them music and culture that got passed on to their children and grandchildren, some of whom became hip-hop practitioners and scholars. Robinson remixes the visual elements of this legacy with comics and science-fiction.
Rakim, one of the best lyricists in rap history, talked about his beginnings in Long Island, NY. Rakim’s grandfather was from the south and, like Stacey Robinson, the rapper gathered what was passed down to him and incorporated this knowledge in his life and practice. Dr. Bradley brought up James Brown and, for Rakim, the late soul/funk performer provided inspiration for his rhyme style. You can watch the Facebook video here.
Bradley and Rakim discussed the “God frequency” (432 Hz) that is said to be the natural frequency of the universe; and attract masses of audiences to music. Pythagoras, who was best known for his theorem about right angle triangles, has a tuning system based on cycling perfect fifths. John Coltrane, another of Rakim’s inspirations, used a harmonic progression variation based on the circle of fifths.
In his autobiography, Yusef Lateef saw Coltrane’s music as a “spiritual journey” that “embraced the concerns of a rich tradition of autophysiopsychic music.” Physicist Stephon Alexander sees within this path the same geometric principle that motivated Albert Einstein’s quantum theory. I was able to create a ‘math and music’ lesson plan based on this concept.
A sound is basically a vibration that creates a wave of pressure that travels through air, water, or solids. We hear sounds thanks to the interaction between the structures in our ears that detect the vibrations and the parts of our brain that interpret those vibrations into recognizable sounds. But these vibrations can do more than just tickle our eardrums. I can see the bridge between what we hear and what we can visualize or generate. What STEAM can do is make the relationships or concepts more clear.