Rhythm Hive is a musical mobile game released by HYBE IM that features music and photocards of the KPop bands BTS, Enhyphen, and TXT. The main musical component is a rhythm game that involves tapping and sliding between positions in a line according to song-specific choreographies as instructed by scrolling notation.
Rhythm games give music listeners new ways of experiencing songs, learning gestures that coarticulate different aspects of the music heard. In Rhythm Hive, tapping patterns sometimes follow drums and instrumental riffs but the sequences mostly focus on the voiced parts, with higher tiers of difficulty approximating the syllabic articulation of sung and rapped lines.
We study examples of game play to identify the relationship between players' finger gestures and the vocal performance in tracks by BTS and consider how this form of musicking can give fans embodied appreciation and understanding of distinctive rap rhythms and expert articulation, even when they do not understand the words performed.