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Mixmaster Andrew Ryan: Blending Hip-Hop, IT, andAcademiaBy Lango DeenMar 18, 2003, 07:30

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Andrew J. Ryan is as passionate about computer science as he is about hip-hop.

From his youthful days in the 1980s, living where Noble Avenue intersects 174thin the Southeast Bronx, N.Y.C., Ryan, a Jamaican immigrant, was a big fan of alltypes of urban creativity and rhythm-spoken words. In his diverse community,hip-hop was born, and boys and girls aspired to be breakdancers, graffiti artists,deejays, or emcees.

What sparked his interest in computer science were the words of a speech given

by Orenthal Hawkins, a Fordham University computer science graduate who laterwould become Ryan's mentor. Hawkins' vivid, day-in-the-life description of his jobas a computer programmer and the possibilities in the field were like music inRyan's ears.

"It sounded like the greatest thing I'd ever heard," Ryan says.

Under Hawkins' guidance, Ryan got accepted into a program calledINROADS/NYC, which allowed him to intern at Chemical Bank's (now ChaseManhattan's) information technology department during his first years of college,and write code for the initialization program at Lockheed Martin's Small Bundle

Parcel Sorter in Owego, N.Y.

Ryan graduated from Binghamton University with a B.Sc. in computer science in1998, and followed it with a master's degree in systems engineering from GeorgeMason University in 2000, while working 30 hours a week as an IBM automationspecialist and adjunct faculty member at GMU.

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He became an analyst in the research and development department at MetronAviation the same year he received his master's, and started a Ph.D. program ininformation technology. By then, Ryan had introduced a couple of classes intoGMU's curriculum: Internet literacy and multimedia research. It wasn't longbefore he'd convinced the university's administrators of the convergence of two

new fields: multimedia and hip-hop. The common denominators? Heavy writingemphasis, group projects, and they're both "real world," Ryan says. "It makesstudents feel what they say means something. They're adding onto what theliterature is."

Whether writing papers on engineering, literature, or hip-hop, Ryan says he tookthe same approach.

"I take the same type of notes," he reasons, "when I read a systems engineeringbook and when I read Richard Wright or Kevin Powell. I was using the sametools. I guess nobody had thought to take it a step further or bring it into the

classroom."

Ryan won awards for Best Science and Engineering paper from the NationalBlack Graduate Student Association at GMU two years in a row. His 2001 awardcame on the heels of a paper he wrote on Tupac Shakur in Doula: The Journal ofRap Music and Hip Hop Culture.

Ryan's hip-hop course, which started as a one-credit pilot last spring, became sopopular with the first group of students that it was graduated to a four-creditelective last fall. This semester, the number of students at the majority-whiteinstitution who tried to enroll for the course exceeded the limit of 28.

Although the genre got its start in Black America, more than 70 percent of hip-hop albums now are purchased by Whites, according to a 2002 paper entitled"Promoting Academic Literacy with Urban Youth through Engaging Hip-hopCulture," published by the National Council of Teachers of English. But Ryansays hip-hop has become more about money than anything else.

"With the way hip-hop is marketed, it means songs that might have a meaningfulmessage [about] AIDS, murder, and unemployment statistics in NortheastWashington, D.C., don't make for a good video or have an appealing hook."

So, now that hip-hop has moved from street corners to multimillion-dollarcorporations, have the Internet and online magazines become the new sourcesfor "real" or "pure" hip-hop?

The Internet offers freedom of expression, Ryan says. "You can put out what youlike, [whereas] Lorenzo 'Ice Tea' Thomas on 93.9 WKYS [in D.C.] says he haslittle control over his play list."

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Hip-hop artists such as AntiPop Consortium -- a group lauded for their interest intechnology and in new ways to use it in creating music -- are where hip-hop hasalways been, Ryan says.

"If you look at the sampling and Grand Master Flash...with invention of the cross-

fader, a device that allows you to go back between two turntables, and the cue,which allows you to listen to one song on speakers and another song onheadphones, this is something an 18-year-old achieved in the Bronx."Technology," Ryan says, "was there from the beginning.

"In the early '80s, people were taking pieces of pure jazz of Miles Davis, of JohnColtrane, [to] incorporate those via loop into their music. Dr Dre didn't go toschool to learn what they're doing; they were plugging into a lamp pole to getelectricity. As hip-hop has matured, they might take a sample from 'Good Times'by Chic and make that into 'Rapper's Delight' [and] loop it 30 or 40 times. Butnow you might have three, four, or five samples playing on top of each other to

make a beat, and to the untrained listener, it sounds like one beat. It takes acertain kind of expertise to blend...."

Ryan says music software like Cubase, Acid Pro, and Cool Edit puts anyone witha certain amount of computer expertise in the same league as most producers.

"It allows you to be a producer without having a studio or even leave yourhouse," Ryan says. "If you start out with a drum then add a bass and a sampleyou might have taken from a video game you have in MP3 form,...you can build abeat the same way as Dr Dre, the Neptunes, or Primo. And then you add theeffect of the Internet, where you can take the beat and upload it to an emcee who

may rhyme over it. And now you have a song with minimal expense."

Born in 1976, the year rap began to emerge, Ryan has grown up with the music.Hip-hop is where he has lived, the music he's listened to, and the traditions,language, and fashion that have shaped him. Ryan, who hopes to complete hisPh.D. in information technology in 2005, is taking his knowledge beyond theclassroom, by giving workshops, lectures, and speeches on hip-hop culture (http://www.metahiphop.com ). He is one of the few researchers poised to engagehip-hop not just as a mode of entertainment but as a medium of communicationthat impacts, represents, and misrepresents the life expectations of youth,especially inner-city youth, in the U.S.

Copyright 2004 by Career Communications Group, Inc.

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