I’m at work. I’m bored. Make me laugh.

Trawl Rockall for:

Boffins announce rap music translator

Excited boffins from Cambridge University have announced the world's first rap music translation machine — and, remarkably, discovered previously unsuspected depths in many current songs.

The £12 million machine uses advanced linguistic algorithms and the world's largest database of language, compiled by experts over the past four years, to listen to musical recordings and decipher what is being said, both literally and figuratively.

Head of the project, Cary Grant, explained that he originally conceived of the project over concerns that his teenage daughter may be listening to inappropriate lyrics in her preferred music — rap.

"The trouble was that no matter how long I sat and listened to the songs, I couldn't make out what on earth they were saying," he explained. "So I designed this machine to listen to the track and then print out what was being said."

It was a heady task but one accomplished six years ago. Mr Grant revealed to The Rockall Times however that once he had managed to get the machine working, he was struck by an even greater problem.

"The first time I got it working, I thought I'd made a major error. The machine would keep pumping out the same meaningless phrases over and over again, not just within the same song but across all rap songs. 'Do you know what time it is?', often rendered as 'I know what time it is' or 'Yo what time it is' or simply 'Time' is one that continues to puzzle me. Not only that but the name of the artist kept re-occurring time and again within the actual text of the song.

"So I checked and rechecked and eventually handed what I believed to be the lyrics to several songs over to a specialist in this field in America and he confirmed the machine was 100 per cent accurate."

This didn't help out Mr Grant though, who remained hopelessly confused. "Once I was certain it was working, I tried to judge whether it was suitable for my child to be listening to," he explained.

"But I have to say, I didn't know what to make of it. It seemed to me to be complete gibberish. Sentences that followed no grammatical or linguistic rules whatsoever. Mindless repetition of stock phrases with no intrinsic value. Entire paragraphs given over to what the singer was going to do, but then no indication to what they had actually done. Most frequently, the song described how incredible their actions were without giving any supporting evidence.

"It all seemed so painfully false. I was certainly left with the impression that this was little more than insecure individuals lying to make themselves feel better. What I couldn't understand was how we had arrived at this point from the origins of rap which gave a fairly accurate and certainly powerful account of life in poor black neighbourhoods in America."

Mr Grant concluded that he must be missing something and so his team embarked on the world's largest ever dictionary of language and hidden meaning.

"We employed over 50 professors of English and Americans worldwide to help compile hidden meanings in words. It took a very long time, but by the end we were inputting Shakespeare and out the other end was coming coherent scripts."

So prepared, they embarked on the ultimate test — rap music.

"I was quite excited, I must admit," Mr Grant tells us. "And then when it started coming out, we were overjoyed." He explains that many of the songs contained hidden depths previously unsuspected by listeners.

"Some of it is almost poetic," Mr Grant explains. "It details a history of ignorant, self-obsessed individuals attempting to come to terms with the greater sense that they are quite possibly the human race's equivalent of pubic lice. The rest of it is just nonsense that happens to rhyme."

 Email an enemy  Pub-friendly printable version  ‘Science’ index page