For this listening description, I chose the song “My First Time” by MC Jin, a song about MC Jin’s first time with a girl and how it inspired him to write a song.

The song’s melody is comprised of a string sample, piano key accents, a vocable sample, and a horn sample. The contour of the song is defined mostly by the string sample that characterizes the chorus of the song. The contour is reminiscent of long plateaus as the notes are sustained over much of the duple meter of the song. The song begins and the contour begins at a middle tone for around four beats and then drops lower for another four beats. This melodic motive repeats throughout the song during the intro and the chorus part of the song. Although the contour moves between a middle pitch and a lower pitch of notes, the character of the melody is conjunct throughout the song. The melody’s notes are extremely close together and do not switch between extremely high or low pitches. The pitches stay relatively close to each other and do not go towards one extreme or another. The range, like the contour, is also not very large. The range is comprised of only a few couple of notes and all of those notes are very close to each other, compared to a song with a well-trained vocalist that goes between many different octaves and pitches. The melody is meant to only complement MC Jin’s rhymes that he lays over the melody so a melody with a larger range or a varying in high and low pitches would distract from the lyrics he raps. The phrasing of the song is pretty simple as it follows the meter almost exactly. The meter is duple, but the phrases take up four beats. So every four beats, MC Jin will leave a slight pause and then go into the next phrase on the “1” note of the next section. The only real melodic motive in the song is string sample that was introduced in the beginning of the song that is repeated in the chorus of the song.

For texture, there are six distinct layers: the drum sample that sets the backbeat of the song, a string sample, piano key accents, a vocable sample, a horn sample, and MC Jin’s rhymes. The drum sample helps set the tempo and beat of the song. It sets the parameters of where Jin needs to begin and end his phrases. The string sample, piano keys, vocable, and horn samples set the melody of the song and give the song more of a melodic quality. Their function is to give the audience a melodic guideline for MC Jin’s rhymes and a funky groove to allow the listener to enjoy aesthetically. All of the layers outside of the slow tempo of the string sample, keep the same speed in order to allow Jin to rhyme more in tune with the rest of the song. If the speeds of the layers differed from the main layer of the drum sample back beat, the timing of Jin’s lyrics would be thrown off.