M2M Day 315: Apply mathematical ‘Graph Theory’ to freestyle rapping
This post is part of Month to Master, a 12-month accelerated learning project. For September, my goal is to continuously freestyle rap for three minutes.
Today, I spent my practice time once again constructing freestyles around a list of randomly generated words (via randomwordgenerator.com). Like the past couple of days, I used these random words as a forcing constraint to guide me into new, exploratory freestyle territory.
After today’s session, I’m finally started to see how this is all going to come together. Here’s the process (for mastering freestyle rapping) as I see it:
- First, you need to lower your inhibitions through practice, fully committing to whatever comes out of your mouth. It’s very hard to freestyle with a filter.
- Next, by using a range of different constraints, you need to explore a diverse territory of freestyling topics, rhymes, punchlines, etc.
- By practicing with constraints in this way, you start building up and strengthening independent pockets of freestyling ideas. Within these pockets, you begin strengthening connections between sets of rhyming words, etc.
- Over time, and through more exposure, these independent pockets of ideas start to overlap and connect, as you find natural bridges between the pockets. These bridges allow you to smoothly transition from one well-tuned pocket to the next, creating a seamless freestyle.
Currently, I’m in phase #3, slowly building out more and more pockets of ideas. However, while I was freestyling today, I found my first bridge between two of these pockets, tasting #4 for the first time.
The more pockets I create, the more options I have for bridges. (This is important because the number of bridges seems to correlated highly with the smoothness and seamlessness of the rap).
Interestingly, for each pocket that I add to my repertoire, the number of possible bridges increase exponentially. In fact, we can use a formula from Graph Theory (the mathematical study of graphs, where graphs are the structures used to model pairwise relations between objects) to perfectly show this relationship:
# of bridges = 0.5 * (# of pockets) * (# of pockets -1)
In other words, if I only have 2 pockets, I can only have 1 bridge. 10 pockets and I can have 45 bridges. 25 pockets and I can have 300 bridges. 100 pockets and I can have 4950. It grows very quickly.
Therefore, the best investment I can make right now is in the number of pockets at my disposal. To do this, I will continue with my exploratory freestyling…
Read the next post. Read the previous post.