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I assigned my music ed students to read this post about transcribing rap verses as melodies and their responses are fascinating. http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2020/transcribing-krs-one/
Almost all of them listen to rap, many of them are aficionados. Yet one after another, they respond, huh, I had never thought about the pitch aspect of this music before. Even after writing and recording their own rap verses!
And it's not like I'm so much more perceptive than them. I listened to rap for 20+ years before it ever dawned on me that it had a pitch aspect. And I only stumbled on the realization that the pitch was important from lots of playing around with Auto-Tune and Melodyne.
Even among musicologists who take rap seriously, it's conventional to say that it's "unpitched", that you can represent it with one-line rhythm notation. Ten seconds of listening attentively to the music shows that to be untrue!
It really goes to show you how much verbal concepts can shape your experience of music. This is why it's so important to do good theory and analysis. You can convince people to not hear things that are plainly audible in the music, or to hear things that aren't there!
Like, if I could convince myself for 20 years that rap is "unpitched" when it obviously isn't, what other nonsense do I believe in spite of the evidence of my own senses?
I despise Schenker not just because of his personal loathesomeness, but because he got all these music theorists to hear V-I cadences in music even when they aren't there. That is some bad craziness.
Just hearing what you're hearing is surprisingly difficult. Hearing past conventions of what you're expecting to hear, or what you're supposed to hear, is really hard!
Same goes for your other senses of course
Anyway, back to rap. One reason people don't think about its pitch aspect is that we don't have a vocabulary to do so, much less a method for notating or otherwise visualizing it. Even among emcees, this aspect of the craft is often not verbalized.
That's not an excuse not to try, though. Standard music notation isn't the right tool for the job, though I do think I've learned a lot from trying to use it and coming up against its inadequacies.
The best method I've found is to put acapellas into Melodyne, screencap them, and annotate them with lyrics, like so: https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2016/visualizing-hip-hop-melodies/
The problem with the Melodyne method is that a) it requires the acapella and b) it's super labor-intensive.
I think it's important to pay more attention to rap as a melodic form because a) it's maybe the most influential and culturally significant musical innovation of my lifetime and b) thinking about it opens windows into lots of other kids of music too.
