Last year hip hop celebrated its 50^th birthday – the genre was reportedly invented by DJ Kool Herc at a party in the Bronx in August 1973. Today, hip hop artists account for nearly a quarter of all streams on Spotify globally.

It’s a dynamic genre, with distinct styles emerging all over the world.

At University College Cork I have been working with J Griffith Rollefson, associate professor in popular music, to map the journey of hip hop using machine learning and semantic tagging. Now we are using that work to build the world’s first research-grade Playlist Generator – a recommender system that doesn’t just find music based on the user listening patterns, but goes deep into the lyrics, beats and themes to take listeners on a tour of hip hop history from NWA’s Straight Outta Compton (Los Angeles, 1988) to the Gully Boy soundtrack (Mumbai, 2019) and beyond.

3rdAI – a play on the ‘3rd eye’ archetype of hip hop consciousness – is the world’s first research-grade Playlist Generator. This is a tool that combines the granular detail of user-defined searches across our specialist-curated, semantically-tagged 450,000+ track lyrical corpus with the machine learning features of our hip hop-savvy AI.

Over the course of our cultural data analytics research on the ERC project, CIPHER: Hip Hop Interpellation (globalcipher.org), we identified that with the development of our 3rdAI Research Engine we had laid the groundwork for a commercialisable and sustainable AI-assisted Playlist Generator tool, profits from which could fund CIPHER’s global hip hop research, community engagement projects.

The 3rdAI Playlist Generator will create synergies between our intended research applications and the massive market for streaming music discovery via bespoke sentiment analysis and recommender systems tools.

The 3rdAI Playlist Generator revolutionises the streaming and playlisting industries, bringing our next-level analysis of the archetypes and intertexts of hip-hop to the public. With 3rdAI, we can can now search for—and visualise over time and space—hip hop’s multilingual, deeply intertextual references to war, peace, crime, community, migration, home and any verbatim or thematically-related concepts we want to explore.

More than that, with the AI-assisted features of the 3rdAI Playlist Generator, we can sonify searches, uncovering and exploring the evolution of lyrics, beats and themes through playlists that track hip-hop’s half century of global evolution.