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Speech Therapist/Speech Language Pathologist are the professionals trained for the assessment and treatment of all kinds of communication disorders. For example:1.Voice Disorder: Feminine Voice In males (Puberphonia), Sudden Loss of Voice, Soft Voice, Hoarse Voice,Breathy Voice, Voice Breaks, Dysphonia due to vocal cord paralysis etc.. Watch before and after voice therapy video to know more click on 1. SLP Sanjay Speech and Hearing Therapy Specialist 2. SLP Sanjay Kumar . For more information click: Voice Disorders2.Professionals Voice Care3.Stammering/Stuttering4.Delayed speech in children: Children's speech and language development follows a typical pattern. For example at first birth day the normal children speak at least one meaningful word, at the age of 2 years they should able to combined two words and at the age of 3years expected to speak in sentences .The deviation in such pattern is considered as delayed speech and language.Mostly it is associated with Autism, hearing impairment, mental retardation, inadequate speech and language stimulation at home, cleft lip and palate, ADHD. Early professional help (Speech therapy) can be very much effective for developing the communication skills and achieving academic goal among such children.How is delayed speech and language diagnosed?Speech language pathologist administers some speech and language test on the child .Also take an interview of the parents related to speech language development and case history of the problem and speech mechanism examination of the child. Based on collected information, comparing with the normative for that age group, they will diagnose the problem.What treatments are available for delayed speech and language?Based on diagnostic report the speech language pathologist make a individual therapy plan .Therapy session can be about 45 minutes and 2-4 times in a week based on the severity of the problem. Usually Parents will be asked to observe the speech therapy session so that they can learn and continue the home training program.Here is a checklist (Click on : SLP Sanjay Speech and Hearing Therapy Specialist ) that you can follow to determine if your child's speech and language skills are developing on schedule. Anything that is checked "no "need for the consultation to a Speech Language Pathologist.5.Mispronunciation/Misarticulation: Beginning in the childhood, the person with deviant articulation or phonology (e.g. saying dod for dog, lam for ram , teater for teacher etc.) may experience unfavorable comments, teasing ,ostracism, exclusion, labeling and frustration.Such experience may result in a low sense of personal worth with the accompanying attitudes of feeling different, incompetent, stupid, socially inept, or disliked. As these unfavorable attitudes continue to develop, they may affect academic performance and behavior. The person with atypical articulation may begin to 'play the part' of an atypical person. Grades my begin to drop, and disruptive behavior may become commonplace.How is misarticulation diagnosed?Speech language pathologist/speech therapist will administer an articulation test with a list of pictures/words which is scientifically designed to test the all speech sounds and they will do the video/Audio recording same time. After that they will do the appropriate analysis and diagnose the problem.What treatments are available for misarticulation?The speech language pathologist will teach the place and manner of articulation for the affected/misarticulated speech sounds .They will also work on auditory processing for those sounds. By early intervention we can make the person absolutely normal.6.Speech language Disorders After Stroke: Aphasia is a language disorder that results from damage to the parts of the brain that contain language. Aphasia causes problems with any or all of the following: speaking, listening, reading, and writing.Some people with aphasia have trouble using words and sentences (expressive aphasia). Some have problems understanding others (receptive aphasia). Others with aphasia struggle with both using words and understanding (global aphasia).Damage to the left side of the brain causes aphasia for most right-handers and about half of left-handers. Individuals who experience damage to the right side of the brain may have additional difficulties beyond speech and language.Individuals with aphasia may also have other problems, such as dysarthria, apraxia, or swallowing problems.How is aphasia diagnosed?The speech-language pathologist (SLP) works collaboratively with the person's family and other professionals (doctors, nurses, neuropsychologists, occupational therapists, physical therapists, social workers) to address all of the person's needs. For example, a person who has had a stroke often has physical problems, such as weakness on one side of the body, that require treatment from a physical or occupational therapist.The SLP evaluates the individual and determines the type and severity of aphasia. The evaluation is done by assessing the following areas of communicationSpeechFluency, vocal quality, and loudnessHow clearly the person speaksStrength and coordination of the speech muscles (tongue, lips)UnderstandingUnderstanding and use of vocabulary (semantics) and grammar (syntax)Understanding and answering both yes-no (e.g., Is your name Bob?) and Wh-questions (e.g., What do you do with a hammer?)Understanding extended speech-the person listens to a short story or factual passage and answers fact-based (the answers are in the passage) and inferential (the patient must arrive at a conclusion based on information gathered from the reading) questions about the materialAbility to follow directions that increase in both length and complexAbility to tell an extended story (language sample) both verbally and in written formExpressingCan the person tell the steps needed to complete a task or can he or she tell a story, centering on a topic and chaining a sequence of events together?Can he or she describe the "plot" in an action picture?Is his or her narrative coherent or is it difficult to follow?Can the person recall the words he or she needs to express ideas?Is the person expressing himself or herself in complete sentences, telegraphic sentences or phrases, or single words?Social CommunicationSocial communication skills (pragmatic language)Ability to interpret or explain jokes, sarcastic comments, absurdities in stories or pictures (e.g., What is strange about a person using an umbrella on a sunny day?)Ability to initiate conversation, take turns during a discussion, and express thoughts clearly using a variety of words and sentencesAbility to clarify or restate when his or her conversational partner does not understandReading and WritingReading and writing of letters, words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphsOtherSwallowing (as needed)Ability to use an augmentative or alternative communication aid (as needed) This information is gathered through both structured observations and formal testsWhat treatments are available for people with aphasia?There are many types of treatment available for individuals with aphasia. The type of treatment depends on the needs and goals of the person with aphasia. There are specialized programs using computers or other published materials. There are also less formal approaches available. For many, a combination of formal and informal tasks is most appropriate. Speech language pathologists are trained for such treatment.RegardsSLP Sanjay kumar,http://B.Sc. (Hons.) Speech and Hearing, AIIMS New. Delhihttp://M.Sc. Speech Language Pathology, AIISH MysoreChief Consultant Speech Language Pathologist & AudiologistSanjay Speech Hearing and Rehabilitation Center(A venture of an AIIMS Delhi Alumnus)# 363 SSA Road, Near Sumangali Seva Aashram, Cholanayakanahalli,R.T.Nagar Post, Bangalore-560032Ph: 08042041980, Web: www.speechtherapyindia.inFB: https://www.facebook.com/SanjaySpeechHearingAndRehabilitationCenter/You Tube: https://www.youtube.com/user/sanjay1774/featured

I believe that Kanye West is the best and most creative musician working in the world today, in any idiom or genre. Here’s a draft of a paper I’m working on that explains why.A few months ago, I was invited to participate in a tutorial session entitled “Why Hip-Hop Is Interesting” at the 2016 International Society for Music Information Retrieval conference. A typical pop music listener might find it surprising that such a tutorial would be necessary. Hip-hop is the most listened-to music genre in the world, at least among Spotify listeners (Hooton 2015). Surely a musical form with such a broad global impact must be interesting. After the tutorial, however, several audience members remarked that they had never heard rap songs analyzed so closely; one said that it had never occurred to her to think about rap music at all. These conference attendees are representative of the music academy generally.Hip-hop has received significant scholarly attention in recent years, but that has mostly been in the context of cultural studies. When humanities scholars engage with hip-hop as an art form, the focus is usually on the lyrics, reading them as a subgenre of African-American literature that just happens to be performed over beats. Interesting though rap lyrics are, it is not sufficient to study them outside of their musical context. “We need to begin to hear not only what these rappers are saying, but also what these musicians are composing - how they are using rhythm, rhyme, and rhetoric to enact survival and celebration, clamor and community” (Walser 1995, 212).Why do music theorists so rarely examine hip-hop for its musical content? Perhaps it is due in part to the way that hip-hop focuses on rhythm so much more heavily than other musical dimensions. The jazz drummer Max Roach characterizes hip-hop as “rhythm for rhythm’s sake” (quoted in Lipsitz 1994, 37). Theorists trained to understand music in terms of harmonic and thematic development might therefore not expect to find much in rap to interest them. I intend to demonstrate that, to the contrary, hip-hop has rich musical interest beyond its rhythmic innovations, using the example of Kanye West’s song “Famous,” from his album The Life Of Pablo (2016).A note about authorship: Contemporary hip-hop is a collaborative art form, especially in the upper commercial echelon where West resides. West made his name as a producer, but on “Famous” he did not work alone. The album credits list West and Havoc as the producers, with co-production by Noah Goldstein, Charlie Heat, and Andrew Dawson, and additional production by Hudson Mohawke, Mike Dean, and Plain Pat. West is the author of “Famous” in the same sense that Steven Spielberg is the author of “E.T.”—he supervised a creative team, rather than doing all of the hands-on work himself. West does not discuss his creative process in detail, so it is difficult to know what specific role all of his collaborators played. For the purposes of this article, when I refer to a musical decision as having been made “by” West, I mean that it was made by West along with any combination of the other producers listed above.“Famous” was immediately embroiled in controversy upon its release due to its part in the ongoing highly-publicized feud between West and Taylor Swift. It is beyond the scope of post to address the controversy; the popular press has covered it exhaustively, and in any event, it is peripheral to the song’s musical interest. For present purposes, we can acknowledge the feud’s existence, and move on.The music video for “Famous” has been another source of extramusical controversy. It is a ten minute art film that shows West in bed sleeping after what appears to be a group sexual encounter with his wife, Kim Kardashian West; his former lover, Amber Rose; his wife’s former lover, Ray J.; her mother, Kaitlyn Jenner; West’s frequent collaborator Rihanna and her former lover, Chris Brown; West’s high-profile nemeses Taylor Swift, Anna Wintour, and George W. Bush; and, for no obvious reason, Bill Cosby and Donald Trump. While this video is richly interesting, it is once again beyond the scope of the present analysis, which focuses only on the aural content of the song. Suffice to say that in his videos as in his music, West embodies the way that hip-hop “takes pleasure in aggressive insubordination” (Rose 1994, 80).West’s lyrics in “Famous” carry their share of aggressive insubordination. Like many of his songs, this one uses problematic and offensive language. In the first verse alone, West greets “all the Southside n****rs that know me best” and calls Taylor Swift “that bitch.” I am reluctant to fall into the cliche of the white hip-hop critic who celebrates the music’s sonic innovations while judging its regressive lyrics (Chapman 2008, 157). I do not want to patronize West, who for all I know is using this racially charged and misogynistic language ironically or critically. While discussing his collaboration with West on his earlier album Yeezus, the singer Justin Vernon observes: “Kanye feels like a director, and I don't think everything he's saying in the songs is actually him saying it every time. It's like a movie, or a concept” (quoted in Dombal 2013). Perhaps we can read the opening verse of “Famous” as a playful boast or taunt. Rose (1994) points out that for all of its technological innovations, rap music “has also remained critically linked to black poetic traditions and the oral forms that underwrite them. These oral traditions and practices clearly inform the prolific use of collage, intertextuality, boasting, toasting, and signifying in rap's lyrical style and organization” (84).We can also regard the function of West’s lyrics not as conveying particular meaning, but rather as being the topmost layer of a bed of rhythmic sound. Adams (2008) encourages us to hear rap lyrics this way, especially in a song like this one: “In rap songs whose lyrics do not seem to have a single unifying theme or narrative… the best approach is first to disregard the semantic meaning of the lyrics, and to treat the syllables of text simply as consonant/vowel combinations that occupy specific metrical locations” ([12]). While West has written albums worth of songs with clear narrative and autobiographical meaning, “Famous” has neither. Furthermore, in addition to West, the song features four additional vocalists whose lyrics also resist literal interpretation. We can feel some confidence that in this case, as in many rap songs, “the music comes both logically and chronologically before the text, and the meaning of the text is often secondary to its interaction with the music” (Adams 2008, [43]).“Famous” has an unusual structure for a mainstream hip-hop song. The graphic below shows the audio file in Ableton Live’s Arrange view.The sections are color-coded as follows: yellow for the intro, orange for the instrumental break, blue for verses, green for the hook/chorus, brown for a groove section that will be discussed in detail below, and pale yellow for the outtro.Aside from the brief instrumental interlude, every section of “Famous” is six, twelve, or twenty-four bars long. For example, the verses are three sets of four-bar phrases. This is highly unusual for the genre; hip-hop songs are almost always built on phrases that are eight, sixteen or thirty-two bars long. “Because of the high degree of repetition, the short length of repeated units, and clear formal boundaries demarcated by changes in text, texture, and other parameters, structural patterns of larger units such as phrases and sections are generally more perceptually salient in vernacular music than in many forms of art music” (Biamonte 2014, [1.2]). The factor-of-three-length phrases in “Famous” thus represent a mild but noticeable hypermetrical dissonance.The six bar intro consists of Rihanna singing over a subtle gospel-flavored organ accompaniment in F-sharp major. She sings a few lines from “Do What You Gotta Do” by Jimmy Webb. This country/pop standard has been recorded many times, but for West, and presumably his listeners, Nina Simone’s 1968 recording is likely to be the most meaningful reference point. Simone carries clear significance for West; he has sampled her on two previous releases, “Blood On The Leaves” (2013) and “Bad News” (2008). Having Rihanna interpolate Nina Simone is the first of many intertextual moments in “Famous.” Walser (1995) cites veteran hip-hop producer Hank Shocklee as “arguing for a view of music as something discursive and social, created out of dialogue with other people in the past and the present rather than through some sort of parthogenesis” (196). West begins his song with a literal dialog between African-American music’s past, as embodied by Simone, and its present, as embodied by Rihanna.After Rihanna’s intro comes a four-bar groove, a more aggressive organ part over a drum machine beat, with Swizz Beatz ad libbing on top. This beat and organ sample were created by Havoc, and were the first elements of the track to be created (Preezy 2016). The drum part is a minimal funk pattern on kick and snare. The snares fall on the backbeats, with the kick playing more complex syncopated patterns around them. As in the James Brown grooves that inspired so many hip-hop producers, “the emphasis of the downbeat grounds the groove while setting up the playfulness of the rest of the phrase" (Greenwald 2008, 268).Aside from the kick drums on each downbeat, the snare drum hits on beats two and four are the most stable element in the rhythm. If there is a single unifying feature of hip-hop, it is the omnipresent accented backbeat. While the syncopation represented by the backbeat is traditionally thought of as a rhythmic equivalent to tension or dissonance, American vernacular forms like rock and hip-hop make beats two and four rhythmically consonant through sheer force of repetition. “Because it is an essential component of the meter, functioning as a timeline—a rhythmic ostinato around which the other parts are organized—I consider the backbeat in rock music to be an instance of displacement consonance rather than dissonance” (Biamonte 2014, [6.2]).While the “Famous” beat references classic hip-hop’s basis in funk, its timbre is futuristic, soaked in cavernous artificial reverb. This conspicuously unnatural sense of space is a world away from the organic-sounding soul samples underpinning West’s first few albums. The move into increasingly otherworldly timbres is in keeping with the broader sweep of popular music. In 1990, Goodwin pointed out that “pop musicians and audiences have grown increasingly accustomed to making an association between synthetic/automated music and the communal (dance floor) connection to nature (via the body). We have grown used to connecting machines and funkiness” (55). Chapman (2008) describes the production style of West’s contemporary Tim “Timbaland” Mosely as evoking “a sonic no-place, where the dancing body resides as a starkly minimal, mechanical trace of the more ‘human’ breakbeats that earlier rap production would sample from 1960s or 1970s soul” (169). Most contemporary hip-hop combines dance rhythms and party-oriented lyrics with bleakly posthuman electronic timbres. West pushes this juxtaposition to the extreme.Swizz Beatz ad-libs gruffly over the brief introductory groove, as he does over much of the rest of the song—in fact, he is present during a larger portion of the track than West himself. His ad-libs are almost free of semantic meaning, functioning completely as percussion. We can take one interjection more literally, the announcement that “We gon’ let the beat rock.” Swizz Beatz is inviting us to relax into an open-ended groove. We could imagine a DJ extending this section in a club or party setting if the crowd is responding energetically. The tidy loop structures of hip-hop and electronic dance tracks are designed to make it easy for DJs to spontaneously extend them at will. Since its origins lie in social dance, groove-based music exists to create a mood rather than a narrative. As Walser (1995) observes: “Because the groove itself is non-teleological, it situates the listener in a complex present, one containing enough energy and richness that progress seems moot” (204). While looping in the studio and the DJ booth alike are achieved through highly technological means, the musical impulse is warmly organic: to foster dance, socializing, or head-nodding.The organ riff that runs throughout the verses of “Famous” is in F-sharp minor, which is an abrupt mode change from the major tonality of the intro section. West’s co-producer Havoc sampled the organ from the closing section of “Mi Sono Svegliato E…Ho Chiuso Gli Occhi” by Il Rovescio della Medaglia, an Italian progressive rock band. This song is itself built around quotes of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, making a pleasingly recursive chain of musical reference.Rap music has been criticized extensively for the practice of sampling. There is a widespread perception that sampling is nothing more than an expedient way to avoid learning instruments or hiring musicians. In this instance, however, using the organ sample was not much more expedient than recording a soundalike would have been. Given the generic simplicity of this organ riff, it would have been a trivial matter for West to replace it using a similar organ sound from any number of software instruments. Why, then, was West willing to take on the expense of the sample clearance and licensing fee? We must assume that he was drawn to the specific ambiance of the sample, because it allowed him “to signify upon a different kind of space and distance, the long perspective of passing time… [T]he materiality of these recorded samples, their saturation with buzz and crackle, intensified their demarcation of a distance between past and present” (Chapman 2008, 160). West has built his entire discography on carefully selected samples. In his output as in hip-hop generally, “[e]xisting recordings are not randomly or instrumentally incorporated so much as they become the simultaneous subject and object of a creative work” (Culter 1989, 21).Verse one continues over Havoc’s drum machine and organ, with West alternating between aggressive rap and loosely pitched singing. West is more highly regarded as a producer than a rapper, but his flow is nevertheless distinctive. In rap terms, the word “flow” encompasses both emcees’ lyric writing and the rhythmic and articulative aspects of of their delivery. The metrical aspects of flow include the placement of rhyming or otherwise accented syllables, the relationship between lyrical phrase boundaries and musical hypermeasures, and the number of syllables per beat. The articulative aspects include the use of legato or staccato, the articulation of consonants or lack thereof, and the placement of any given syllable ahead of or behind the beat (Adams 2009).Most contemporary emcees use what Krims (2000) has called a “speech-effusive style” characterized by the casual enunciation and loose rhythms of everyday spoken language. This is in contrast to two other major flow styles described by Krims. One is "sung," a schoolyard chant feel with on-beat accents and strict couplet groupings, characteristic of the first generation of rappers like Run-DMC and Kurtis Blow. The other is "percussion-effusive," a more rhythmically complex flow that is freer with metrical boundaries and rhyme schemes, but which still has crisp articulation and clearly discernable regular rhythm patterns. This pattern is more typical of a later cohort of rappers like Rakim and Q-Tip. West’s flow is mostly speech-effusive, but in “Famous,” his rhymes have a simpler chant-like quality harkening back to early rap.It is a widely held belief that rap has no melodic content. However, attentive listening reveals that all rappers use pitch expressively. The border between rapping and singing is a porous one, and most emcees cross it routinely in the course of a song, as West does in “Famous.” Furthermore, even in straight rapping, the pitch sequences are deliberate and meaningful. The pitches might not fall on the piano keys, but they are melodic nonetheless. The easiest way to explore the pitch content of rap is to use pitch-tracking software on acapella tracks. Sadly, there is no acapella version of “Famous” available. However, West delivers one line in the second verse “in the clear” (without instrumental backing), making it amenable to automated pitch detection. The graphic below shows the line as visualized in Melodyne, with lyric annotations by the author:With the assistance of the audio-to-MIDI feature of Ableton Live, it is possible to map these pitches to the closest piano-key note.Even this short fragment shows considerable melodic interest, starting and ending on B3, with a leap up to D4 and drops to G3 in between. Melodic analysis of rap vocals is a largely untapped vein of potential scholarly inquiry, and a promising area of future research.After the first verse would conventionally come the “hook,” the hip-hop term for a chorus. Rihanna continues to interpolate the Jimmy Webb/Nina Simone quote from the intro over the F-sharp major organ part from the intro. Swizz Beatz continues his ad-libbed interjections on top. While his function on the track is mostly to add rhythmic energy, in this section he also adds another layer of intertextuality by quoting “Wake Up Mr. West,” a short skit on West’s album Late Registration. That skit, in turn, is itself richly intertextual—it features a comedian (DeRay Davis) imitating another comedian (Bernie Mac) over a sample of “Someone That I Used To Love” by Natalie Cole (1980).Verse two is much like verse one. At the end, we expect Rihanna to return with the hook, but instead we only hear her sing the pickup, “I just wanted you to know.” In place of the hook, the track shifts into a new F-sharp major groove over fuller drums, including a noisy artificial snare sound resembling a socket wrench. The lead vocal in this section is a sample of “Bam Bam” by Sister Nancy (1982).“Bam Bam” is a frequently-used sample, one that a more-than-casual rap listener is likely to find familiar. The author immediately recognized it from “Lost Ones” by Lauryn Hill (1998), “Just Hangin’ Out” by Main Source (1991), and a variety of unofficial mixtapes.West does not merely sample “Bam Bam.” He also reharmonizes it. Sister Nancy’s original is a I–bVII progression in C Mixolydian. West pitch shifts the vocal to fit it over a I–V–IV–V progression in F-sharp major. Rather than simply transposing the sample up or down a tritone, he instead keeps the pitches close to their original values by changing their chord function. Here is a transcription of Sister Nancy’s original:And here is the sample as it appears in “Famous”:Pitch shifting a vocal by even a small interval alters its timbre. The formants are transposed in parallel with the base pitch, rather than staying constant as they would if the vocalist were actually singing at the new pitch. Also, the phase vocoding that makes it possible to alter pitch independently of tempo further colors the sound. The resulting sonic artifacting gives Sister Nancy the feel of a robot from the future. This association directly conflicts with the lo-fidelity recording artifacts in the sample. As with the Nina Simone interpolation and drum machine part, the juxtaposition of audio past and future represented by the Sister Nancy sample has an otherworldly effect.Like the Il Rovescio della Medaglia song discussed above, Sister Nancy’s song is comprised of pre-existing musical elements. She is singing over a widely used instrumental track (a “riddim” in reggae parlance) called “Stalag 17” by Winston Riley (1973). Furthermore, her chorus is a quote from a song of the same name by Toots Hibbert (1966). There is a pleasing symmetry between her collage aesthetic and West’s. We cannot be certain whether West selected “Bam Bam” on that basis, or because of its lyrics, its melody, its sound, or some motivation known only to him. But it is interesting to speculate. “The arrangement and selection of sounds rap musicians have invented via samples, turntables, tape machines, and sound systems are at once deconstructive (in that they actually take apart recorded musical compositions) and recuperative (because they recontextualize these elements creating new meanings for cultural sounds that have been relegated to commercial wastebins)” (Rose 1994, 85). What new meaning does West create for “Bam Bam” by including it within “Famous”? Sister Nancy’s chorus means “What a bummer” in Jamaican patois. She is referring to her struggles to make it as an emcee in the male-dominated world of dancehall reggae. Does West intend that meaning to rub against the casual misogyny of his own verses?After twenty-four bars of the Sister Nancy groove, the track ends with another Jimmy Webb/Nina Simone quote. But this time, rather than Rihanna singing, we hear a sample of Simone herself.West has combined an interpolation of a sample with the original recording before, on “Gold Digger” (2005), in which Jamie Foxx’s imitation of Ray Charles is followed by a sample of Charles himself. However, that juxtaposition occurred at the very beginning of the track. In “Famous,” Simone’s first appearance comes at the end, and on first hearing comes as quite a surprise.We can read West’s bringing Rihanna and Simone together on his song as a form of bragging. Few producers can afford a guest appearance by Rihanna. Similarly few have the resources or the audacity to sample a sacred and iconic figure like Simone. By doing both, is West engaged a kind of musical conspicuous consumption, the sonic equivalent of flashy jewelry? Or does he intend a deeper musical meaning?Holm-Hudson (1997) observes that John Oswald’s sampling practice “creates a larger web of stylistic references from the interaction of various formerly unrelated samples. Oswald's technique, in particular, often extricates extramusical meaning from the ‘innocent’ sample, ironically commenting on its source, the sampled artist or the music industry that spawned both” (Holm-Hudson 1997, 24). This analysis applies neatly to West’s use of Simone as we compare it retroactively to Rihanna’s interpolation. West presumably wants us to feel the contrast between Rihanna’s heavily processed purr and Simone’s unvarnished, preacherly tone. Reynolds (2012) comments on the way that recorded music in general and sampling in particular can create uncanny links across time: “Recording is pretty freaky, then, if you think about it. But sampling doubles its inherent supernaturalism. Woven out of looped moments that are like portals to far-flung times and places, the sample collage creates a musical event that never happened; a mixture of time-travel and séance” (313). By sampling Simone, West invites us to wonder what she might have made of Rihanna, and of West himself.Below, the author has constructed a flowchart showing the samples and samples of samples in “Famous.”We can classify the samples in “Famous” using the typology of sampled material proposed by Ratcliffe (2014). The kick and snare are short, isolated fragments. The organ riff is a phrase, a self-referential musical element, rather than a pointer to a recognized external source. The Sister Nancy and Nina Simone samples are larger, more extensive referential elements. While sampling is ubiquitous in hip-hop, “Famous” is remarkable for deploying samples at so many different time scales.In interviews, West rarely gives specific insight into his creative process. We are forced to surmise as to how “Famous” came about in the studio after Havoc brought in the beat and organ sample. Gelineck and Serafin (2009) describe two major approaches to creating electronic music. The producer (who Gelineck and Serafin refer to as “the composer”) may start with a clear goal or idea of the finished product. Alternatively, the producer may be inspired by playful exploration and experimentation using whatever sound sources and technologies are at hand. As quoted in Preezy (2016), Havoc describes West as having “the idea for how he wanted to go” with “Famous.” Havoc also describes a process by which West’s collaborators will introduce ideas in the studio for West to react to in the moment. Taken together, these remarks suggest that West combines both a goal-oriented and a playful/experimental approach to composition.West’s music provokes strong emotional responses. In the process of writing this paper, the author discussed it with various friends and students. Their comments ranged from enthusing about West as a genius to denouncing him as an egotistical buffoon. Similarly, their assessments of “Famous” run the gamut from proclaiming it a masterpiece to dismissing it as offensive and empty. As Walser (1995) observes: “Hip hop's appeal to a variety of audiences, its cultural legitimacy, and its vulnerability to censorship all depend upon reactions to the music: whether its repetition enervates or animates, whether its noisiness alienates or accreditates, whether its complexity disorients or situates” (210). In “Famous,” we are reacting to a dense interplay of rhythms, harmonies, timbres, vocal styles, and intertextual meanings, not to mention all the complexities of cultural context. How do we even begin to evaluate such a work?Like many rappers, West praises himself for being “fresh.” The meaning of the word in hip-hop slang could be referencing any of its conventional senses: new, refreshing, appetizing, attractive, or sassy (Hein 2015). We frequently praise music for its originality, but in sample-based music like hip-hop, that term is not as good a proxy for musical quality. We need a criterion that gets at the aspects of a successful rap song: emotional truth-telling, inventive wordplay, creative juxtaposition of existing and novel musical elements, the construction of a compelling soundscape, a beat suitable for dancing or head nodding, and situatedness within a complex cultural context. We can best judge hip-hop by its freshness. “Famous” is a difficult and at times unpleasant work, but it is extraordinarily fresh.ReferencesAdams, K. (2009). On the Metrical Techniques of Flow in Rap Music. Music Theory Online, 15(5), 1–12. Retrieved from http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.09.15.5/mto.09.15.5.adams.html____ (2008). Aspects of the Music/Text Relationship in Rap. Music Theory Online, 14(2). Retrieved from http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.08.14.2/mto.08.14.2.adams.htmlBiamonte, N. (2014). 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A good start might be the Speech recognition wikipedia page to get some useful pointers. I’d also look at the documentation of existing frameworks (such as HTK, Kaldi, …), just to get an idea of their main architecture and components. The size and complexity of those existing projects might give you an idea of how long it will take you to do something similar.I guess if you want to make your own recognition engine from scratch, you want to make it in some way different to the already existing ones. Given that you don’t know much (otherwise you wouldn’t need to ask this question), I’d start by playing around with what’s available to get an idea and then decide if it’s really worth redoing the work done in the last 30 or so years by thousands of experts, or contribute to their work in form of fixes and new algorithms for open-source frameworks.EDIT:Some theoretical background which is useful when learning speech recognition, and speech processing in general.Speech contains lots of information which can be extracted with different levels of difficulty. The most basic form is the audio signal exiting a human’s mouth. It is nothing else than vibrations of air pushed out of the lungs and formed by the vocal chord. Every speaker has a specific resonance frequency of the vocal chord (much like fingerprints) which the listener detects as tone and pitch of the voice. This is how we distinguish people by listening to them. Then there is, of course, the phonetic information - what the speaker is saying. The phonetic information can be extracted to be rewritten as a sequence of phonemes, which are then joined into words and sentences. Finally we can apply natural language processing on this transcript to extract the meaning of what was said.Speech is analog, but our computers are digital. The input signals are also digital.. sampled and quantified - so they are discreet in both time and value when we start processing them. Both sampling and quantization introduce errors in the signal - aliasing (from sampling) and quantization noise, but digital signals are easier to work with. Also speech is constantly changing, up to 50 times a second, so we partition the input signal into frames in which the speaker presumably said only one phoneme. This is tricky, because we don’t know the boundaries between phonemes in advance. What we end up doing is having slightly overlaying frames.So how we get to a usable transcript of an audio file containing speech? We would like to have a robust method which works for every speaker, at least those speaking one specific language. The input we have contains periodic pulses (from the vocal chord), has non-zero average value (the signal has a DC component), can be of different volume and length. There can be people saying an ‘a’ sound for 0.1 second or 1.2 seconds… we have to match both. Background noise also has to be accounted for.First we get rid of the speaker-specific components. The DC value of the signal is easy do remove, just calculate the average and subtract it from each sample. Then we model the speakers voice-forming organs (vocal chord, mouth, … ) using a linear filter called LPC (Linear Predictive Coding). This filter can be set up automatically to fit the speech input quite well, but has too few coefficients to predict the pulses coming from pitch (these are too low frequency). The prediction error of the LPC filter thus contains some low-energy noise and high-energy periodic pulses. To filter out those pulses we use a long-term prediction filter, which guesses the next sample from one sample from k steps in the past - we try every feasible k until we get the one with the lowest error rate.So here we have an LPC filter with it’s coefficients, we have the pitch, and some noise left after filtering. The LPC filter coefficients tell us the most about the phoneme - everyone holds their mouth in a specific way when forming an ‘a’ sound. Also from the measured pitch we guess if the current frame was voiced or not.. that’s how we can distinguish e.g. ‘d’ from ‘t’ … both are formed the same way, but for one the vocal chord resonates, for the other it stays shut. The LPC coefficients and the information if the frame was voiced are input into a recognizer which decides what phoneme the frame corresponds to.The recognizer can be some kind of scoring function (probability distribution, neural network, whatever…), which is usually trained using machine learning on big, transcribed-by-hand audio databases, and assigns a probability of being a given phoneme to each frame. Then the phoneme with the highest probability is picked.Next the phonemes are assembled into words. This step is useful because the individual phonemes can be context-dependent and can sound differently when following different other phonemes, at the end of a word, etc. For recognizing words, HMMs - Hidden Markov Models - are used. The HMMs used for word recognition are one-way automaton (Finite State Machines which cannot go back to a previously visited state) with probabilistic transitions. Each state of the HMM will have an evaluator of the probability that the current frame fits the model of a word. Each word in a dictionary receives a likelihood score from the HMM model and the most likely word is output into the transcript.Needless to say, each part of the pipeline needs to be trained… the phoneme and word recognizers only once (but it takes long and requires a lot of resources), the LPC filter and the long-term prediction filter (for the pitch) for each frame or group of frames (these two are fairly simple).So a list of theoretical and practical skills to build all this include signal processing, machine learning, automaton theory, statistics, and to make useful language models also phonetics, linguistics and other related fields.