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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
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| Cantometrics | 1/3 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantometrics | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T15:59:06.335460+00:00 | kb-cron |
Cantometrics ("song measurements") is a method developed by Alan Lomax and a team of researchers for relating elements of the world's traditional vocal music (or folk songs) to features of social organization as defined via George Murdock's Human Relations Area Files, resulting in a taxonomy of expressive human communications style. Lomax defined Cantometrics as the study of singing as normative expressive behavior and maintained that Cantometrics reveals folk performance style to be a "systems-maintaining framework" which models key patterns of co-action in everyday life. His work on Cantometrics gave rise to further comparative studies of aspects of human communication in relation to culture, including: Choreometrics, Parlametrics, Phonotactics (an analysis of vowel frequency in speech), and Minutage (a study of breath management). Instead of the traditional Western musicological descriptive criteria of pitch, rhythm, and harmony, Cantometrics employs 37 style factors developed by Lomax and his team in consultation with specialists in linguistics, otolaryngology and voice therapy. The vocal style factors were designed to be easily rated by observers on a five-point scale according to their presence or absence. They include, for example: group cohesion in singing; orchestral organization; tense or relaxed vocal quality; breathiness; short or long phrases; rasp (vocal grating, such as associated, for example with the singing of Louis Armstrong); presence and percentage of vocables versus meaningful words); and melisma (ornamentation), to name a few.
In the early stages of his work on the Cantometrics coding system, Lomax wrote of the relationship of musical style to culture:"Its fundamental diagnostic traits appear to be vocal quality (color, timbre, normal pitch, attack, type of melodic ornamentation, etc.) and the degree in which song is normally monodic or polyphonic. The determinative socio-psychological factors seem to be . . . the type of social organization, the pattern of erotic life, and the treatment of children.... I myself believe that the voice quality is the root [diagnostic] element. From this socio-psychological complex there seem to arise a complex of habitual musical practices which we call musical style"
== History of the theory == Lomax first publicly proposed the Cantometrics project in 1959 and launched a group project in conjunction with the Anthropology Department at Columbia University to implement his vision. Early collaborators included musicologist Victor Grauer, who was the first co-creator with Lomax of the Cantometrics computer coding system. Subsequent project members included distinguished Columbia University anthropologist Conrad M. Arensberg, a founder of applied anthropology; anthropologists Edwin Erickson and Barbara Ayres; and statistician Norman Berkowitz. Laban shape notation specialist Irmgard Bartenieff and dancer and movement therapist Forrestine Paulay co-created the Choreometrics movement coding system, for analyzing dance, mapping the movement of the torso, hands, feet, and use of performance space. In 1968 Lomax's research team published a book, Folk Song Style and Culture, in which they stated that, "for the first time, predictable and universal relationships have been established between the expressive and communication processes, on the one hand, and social structure and culture pattern, on the other".
Gideon D'Arcangelo, a member of the Cantometrics team, described their work this way:Using 37 criteria of observation, the Cantometrics team analyzed over 4,000 songs – around 10 representative songs from over 400 cultures. Each song profile they made was recorded on a computer punch-card and loaded onto the Columbia mainframe. A companion study of dance, Choreometrics, produced analyses of over 1,500 dance performances. Only a computer was capable of handling this enormous data set and looking for the patterns hidden within. The team, led by programmer Norman Berkowitz, developed a powerful set of statistically driven software tools to sort, separate, and group the performance data. Their analyses resulted in the first ever taxonomy of human performance style and in a series of maps showing the dis-semination of culture across the planet. These were presented to the American Association of Science (1966) and later published in the collaborative volume, Folk Song Style and Culture (1968).
== Results ==
The Cantometric study of song revealed strong statistical relations between song style and social norms. Alan Lomax stated that the Cantometrics analysis amply justified his original hypothesis that sexually restrictive and highly punitive societies correlated with degree of vocal tension. The tendency to sing together in groups, tonal cohesiveness, and the likelihood of polyphonic singing were all associated with fewer restrictions on women. Multipart singing occurs in societies where the sexes have a complementary relationship. Other results included strong correlations between length of phrase and precision of articulation, and degree of ornamentation with social stratification. It was found that explicitness or the information load of song varies with the level of economic productivity of the subsistence system. Murdock's taxonomy encoded the economic, social, and political features of more than 1,100 societies that ethnologists had studied up until that time. In many cases, these codes formed scales – for example, the one concerning the number of levels of political authority outside the local community, from 0 among hunters, to 4 for irrigation empires. Lomax and Arensberg arranged the codes into scales in order to measure the kinds of behaviors of features of culture, such as levels of production or permanence of settlement. When they added factors of expressive communication to the Murdock measures of social relations it produced a geographical taxonomy of human culture.
== Branching out into Choreometrics == Three chapters of Folk Song Style and Culture are devoted to Choreometrics. In chapter ten, "Dance, Style, and Culture," Lomax, Bartenieff, and Paulay describe the origin and meaning of the term: "In order to distinguish the level of this comparative study of movement from the levels where previous investigators have worked, we have given the method a freshly-coined designation, Choreometrics, meaning the measure of dance, or dance as a measure of culture.". They wrote that: