nbsp;https://mixcord.co/acapella/p/eDi9sUSvTk…

(Link required for viewing. Again, please ignore the silliness of my face and facial expressions, as well as the fact that my first thought for a username was aridizzle. Very embarrassing.)

For this project I wanted to pay homage to the Adhan, the muslim call to prayer, while also paying homage to contemporary Islam as it is expressed in hip hop in the African American Islamic community.

In doing this project I knew that I wanted to:

a) abstract the diction used in the Adhan, paying special attention to reoccurring assonance and consonance like that which is present in the phrase “La ilaha illa Allah”

b) maintain a spiritual sound which suggested a sort of connection to be gained between the worshiper and the worshipped

c) add an element of contemporaneous Islamic hip hop to make the beat more interesting and a bit more solid

I think I was fairly successful in terms of meeting these markers! For the first recording (top left), I used an “Ah” vowel and progressed through a musical phrase which to me sounded as if it might suggest spirituality. For the second (top right), I repeated “La” in steady (excepting a quick breath) eighthnotes. For the third (bottom left), I chose “illah” as the sound and added it on the up beat. For the last (bottom right), I added a sort of spontaneous and percussive beat-boxing beat.

This was my first time using the Acapella app, so I ran into a few problems regarding maintaining a consistent tempo among all of my recordings. I tried various standard methods of tempo-unification to make the four parts run cohesively (namely, using a metronome), but ultimately discovered that the best method to keep the four parts together was just by listening to the sound/tempo provided by the previously recorded section.

Ultimately, while the rhythms used in my Acapella Hip Hop Adhan don’t always meet up correctly, it does sound very cool, semi-spiritual, and vaguely-contemporaneous, all things which I will be counting as contributing to a positive outcome!