The 5th 'Hip Hop' Element: Sound Science Emceeing = mc²

While it is accurate to say that 'rap' is 'hip-hop' it is not entirely accurate to say that 'hip-hop' is 'rap' because hip-hop is more of a cultural movement that has intercepted urban communities in recent years.

Hip-Hop or 'rapping' is also known as Emceeing, spitting bars or 'chanting rhyming lyrics'.

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This flowing word content of the rap art form can be broken down into three different components:

(a) rhyme
(b) rhythm
and (c) delivery.

Rapping is distinct from spoken word poetry in that its delivery is performed in time to a beat.

However, even though rapping is a primary ingredient in hip-hop music, excerpts of the poetic word content of rap can be delivered without a beat or any music accompaniment.

There are four elements of Hip-Hop:

(1) Tagging (graffiti art)
(2) B-boying (break dancing)
(3) Emceeing (MCing)
(4) Rapping (poetic lyrics)

Most recently there be may be a 5th element incorporated to this list of hip-hop elements:

(5) Sound Science
(improving memory with rhyming word association).

When students expressed that they find Science subjects like Chemistry and Biology difficult to memorize, Educators looked at other courses students were good at, like Shakespeare, Poetry & Creative Composition and collectively concluded that the 'story telling' incorporated in these courses was serving as a 'mental marker' which helped the brain remember the summary of the subject.

As a result, hip-hop based 'Sound Science' programs are being introduced to young students whereby the students have to create a rap with scientific words as a means in helping them remember difficult definitions by stimulating the memory center of their brain with rhyme.

This modern hip-hop based collaboration makes the approach to Science more fun and current which may help encourage students to foster a new zeal when it comes to choosing science-based courses in school.

Sound Science hip-hop inspired teaching method approaches for chemistry and biology may also inspire new ways of reaching out and connecting with the young urban art student.

Six or Three Degrees of Separation?

Contacts and Influences:
It's a smaller world today and with all the online social networks along with an ever-growing populous, the alleged six degrees of separation may be shrinking to three degrees..
For example my friend Steve plays saxophone, his niece Debra Cox is an amazing singer, she moved to LA to make it big, Debra signed with Whitney Houston's manager and became an award-winning R&B artist.

Above: me with Nicole Holness singer / co-host of MTV Live
Copyright © 2011 Tomitheos Photography - All Rights Reserved

MTV Live co-host Nicole Holness (featured pic) is related to Debra Cox who is then related to my friend Steve which concludes a 'three' degrees of separation theory.

To clearly understand this theory we must look at the history:

The phrase 'six degrees of separation' refers to the notion that everyone is approximately six steps away from any person on Earth by way of introduction. If true then we are inexplicably intertwined in a web of friends whereby one can connect us to any two people in the world in six steps or less. This friend of a friend acquaintance chain was originally set out by 1929 short story author Frigyes Karinthy and later popularized by playwright John Guare and Will Smith's 1993 movie.

Six degrees of separation is basically the relationship links that occur in quantitative social structures which develop from a direct result of the evolution of these relationships that intercept our social groups and organizations. Michael Gurevich conducted seminal work in his empirical study of social structure and the fractal signature these networks design, this trail or rather these sets of trails was later referred to as 'Sociometry'.

Mathematician Manfred Kochen, an urban design Austrian Statist, extrapolated these sociometry empirical results in a mathematical manuscript: 'Contacts and Influences' where he concluded that in a North American population two individuals can almost certainly contact one another by means of at least two intermediaries.

Perhaps today, in an internet based social structure, one individual can infinitely bridge over to the whole world's population thus foreshadowing a more realistic 'three degrees of separation' scenario as predicted in the findings by American psychologist Stanley Milgram.

Stroke of Genius - Drawing from Memory

A Man of Both Worlds:
___ 'Leonardo Da Vinci bridged the gap between Art and Science.'

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Leonardo da Vinci's was very controversial in his time but today his art as well as his scientific observations, his inventions, and interesting facts about his life make him nothing less than a genius which, in return, have earned him a permanent place in our history.


Art in History:

In the Middle Ages 'the artist' had an immutable purpose to his life accompanied by an obligation to his society to serve the gift of divinity. This was because Art was nothing more nor less than a representation of the World of God, and the artist, the medium through which this Universe becomes visible. Therefore the artist, like God was a creator: a manufacturer of physical things of beauty from thought, and the artist was a well respected 'craftsperson' that was perceived at a much higher level than a blacksmith or a shoemaker that also had important roles in societies of that time.

As we analyze an artist's talent we come to understand that the greatest gift to an artist is visual memory with the talent to convey and replicate that on a physical medium. To understand this one must understand how neuron networks store and retrieve memories, how synapse molecules change to define a network path and, hence, how information flows through the brain to the extremities like the hand and fingers.


How Memory Works:

Information flows from the outside physical world through our sight, hearing smelling, tasting and touch sensors. Memory is simply the way we store and recall things we have sensed.

Recalling memories sparks many of the same neural paths we originally used to sense the experience and, therefore, almost re-creates the event. For an artist, the key is to articulate that imagery with detailed dexterity.

Our brain will store, for fractions of a second, sensory information in areas located throughout the cortex. Then some data moves into short-term memory. Finally, some of that information goes in long-term storage in various parts of the cortex, much of it returning to the sensory cortex areas where we originally received it.

Only the data that catches our attention, like a red light while driving or an important street name, will go into short-term memory. We can hold short-term data for about a half minute.

We use the hippocampus to consolidate new memories. An event creates temporary links among cortex neurons. For example, in seeing a red apple the color 'red' will get stored in the visual area of the cortex, and the sound of eating a red apple gets stored in the auditory area. When a new fact is remembered like 'fresh apple,' the new memory data converges on the hippocampus, which then sends the information along a path several times over to strengthen the links.

Perhaps that is why artists tend to draw and paint multi colored fruit on a tabletop setting, because in their fruitful simplicity, fruit can be the ideal drawing exercise of how the brain can remember a familiar color and its associated shape.


The Science of Drawing:

The memory information follows a path which is called the 'Papez Circuit' which starts at the hippocampus and then circulates through more of the limbic system which in return evokes emotion in the brain. For an artist, emotion would allow for inspiration to set in which in return can physically manifest into an art form. Inspiration is key in motivating an artistic individual to draw-out the thought and/or memory that is in mind onto a blank canvas, thus in conclusion, creating a visually artful masterpiece.

Vitruvian Man - achieving the perfect proportions of the human anatomy

The body is a flow of energies and the greatest harmony in the anatomically correct human form is the symmetrical relations of the extremities to the general magnitude of the body as a whole.



After some research I compiled some basic rules that should make drawing the human body proportions easier.


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These drawing rules for proportions are based on an aesthetically pleasing ideal and not on the proportions of the average person.


Charcoal drawing: STEP 1


The Head:
(a) If you where to draw a line horizontally across the head center and vertically down the center, the first thing you would notice is that the horizontal line goes between the eyes.
(b) The width between the middle of the eyes is the same as the distance as the outer edge to the temple looking from the front profile perspective of the face.
(c) The top of the ear aligns with the eye brow and the ear lobe under or between the nostrils and the upper lip.
(d) The bottom of nose is half way between the eye center line and the chin bone.
(e) The lips are half way between the lower nostrils and the chin bone although for the average human the lips are nearer to the nose than the chin.
(f) The back base of the head where the spine connects aligns to the nostrils.


Painting process: STEP 2


The Body:
The ideal body should be 7 to 8 head lengths from tip of head to the feet.
(1) The already drawn head can be used to counts as one head length:
(2) Chin to nipple height.
(3) Nipple to belly button.
(4) Belly button to groin.
(5) Groin to lower thigh.
(6) Lower thigh to under the knee.
(7) Low knee to upper ankle.
(8) Upper ankle to foot base.


"Artwork is considered good when it provokes thought..
..but also when it becomes a fraction of the reality it represents
and then transforms into a persistent tangible illusion of it." ~Tomitheos


The Body is a Temple

'In the members of a temple there ought to be the greatest harmony in the symmetrical relations of the different parts to the general magnitude of the whole. Then again, in the human body the central point is naturally the navel. For if a man can be placed flat on his back, with his hands and feet extended, and a pair of compasses centered at his navel, the fingers and toes of his two hands and feet will touch the circumference of a circle described therefrom. And just as the human body yields a circular outline, so too a square figure may be found from it. For if we measure the distance from the soles of the feet to the top of the head, and then apply that measure to the outstretched arms, the breadth is found to be
the same as the height, as in the case of plane surfaces which are completely square.'
Marcus Vitruvius, De Architectura, Book III, Chapter 1, page 3