Automatic Detection of Internal and Imperfect Rhymes in Rap Lyrics

Imperfect and internal rhymes are two important features in rap music often ignored in the music information retrieval community. We develop a method of scoring potential rhymes using a probabilistic model based on phoneme frequencies in rap lyrics. We use this scoring scheme to automatically identify internal and line-final rhymes in song lyrics and demonstrate the performance of this method compared to rules-based models. Higher level rhyme features are produced and used to compare rhyming styles in song lyrics from different genres, and for different rap artists.