When I do raps, I always endeavor to make my words understandable, but sometimes I fail in that mission. I started to think, yesterday, about how I'll bet some raps are more understandable than others, not only because of proper enunciation, but also because the more understandable ones might use word combinations that are more common in English than ones that don't. For example, "I went to the store" is a phrase more commonly used in English than "I went to the bear."
In statistical terms, there's a higher probability that the word, "the" will be followed by the word, "store" than it will be followed by the word, "bear." Those low probability word combinations take your brain a longer time to process than the high probability ones. Because of that, raps using common word combinations'll be easier to understand than raps that use unusual word combinations.
This inspired me to get on my iPad and pretend I was writing an email to myself. I'd start with a word, and then go to the little word-suggestions thingy at the bottom of the screen and just push that button over and over. I did that cuz the word suggestions are based on what the computer's prediction of the next word, given the previous word. I'm guessing that those word suggestions are based on those probabilities I'm talking about. The iPad is going to select a word that is the most probabilistically likely to follow the previous word, cuz it wants to get it right.
I ended up generating some word salad that way, and I put it into a nice li'l rap song. Here it is.
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