The art of signed music involves the use of rhythmicized signs from a signed language, such as American Sign Language (ASL), in a musical context. Signed music encompasses a variety of subgenres, including ASL hip hop or “dip hop.” A typical dip hop performance involves a Deaf or hard-of-hearing artist simultaneously performing vocalized and signed rapping over a looped background beat. Although dip hop emerged as a grassroots movement in the early 1990s, it has received little analytical attention in the scholarly literature on hip hop. In this paper, the authors combine techniques adapted from analyzing rhythm in non-signed rap music with techniques adapted from analyzing non-rapped signed music to analyze the rhythmic flow of tracks by dip hop artists Sean Forbes, Wawa, and Signmark. The authors demonstrate that dip hop artists have developed genre-specific rhythmic paradigms and tropes to convey the periodicity and rhyme that are fundamental to rap music. Specifically, we address the alignment of rhythm and meter in signed and vocal rap and the conveyance of a repeated “beat” through rhythmic signing. The analyses of dip hop tracks reveal important differences between dip hop and vocal rap, as well as differences between the conventions of dip hop and ASL poetry.

中文翻译：

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聋人嘻哈中的节奏技巧

手语音乐艺术涉及在音乐语境中使用手语的节奏符号，例如美国手语 (ASL)。签名音乐包含多种子流派，包括 ASL 嘻哈或“dip hop”。典型的 dip hop 表演涉及聋人或听力障碍的艺术家同时在循环背景节拍上进行有声和有符号的说唱。尽管 dip hop 在 1990 年代初作为草根运动出现，但在 hip hop 的学术文献中很少受到分析关注。在本文中，作者将分析非手语说唱音乐中的节奏所采用的技术与分析非说唱手语音乐所采用的技术相结合，以分析 dip hop 艺术家 Sean Forbes、Wawa 和 Signmark 的曲目节奏流。作者证明，dip hop 艺术家已经开发出特定流派的节奏范式和比喻来传达说唱音乐的基本周期和韵律。具体来说，我们解决了节奏和节奏在手语和声乐说唱中的对齐，以及通过节奏手语来传达重复的“节拍”。对 dip hop 曲目的分析揭示了 dip hop 和声乐说唱之间的重要差异，以及 dip hop 和 ASL 诗歌的惯例之间的差异。