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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cantometrics | 2/3 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantometrics | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T15:59:06.335460+00:00 | kb-cron |
Choreometrics tests the proposition that dance is the most repetitious, redundant, and formally organized system of body communication present in a culture... The dance is composed of those gestures, postures, movements, and movement qualities most characteristic and most essential to the activity of everyday, and thus crucial to cultural continuity. By treating these elements redundantly and formally, dance becomes an effective organizer of joint motor activity. Dance supplies the metronome to meter and regulates, or orders the energy and attention of groups of people, and thereby acquires the weight of general community approval. Thus dance functions to establish and renew consensus at moments when a society, without further discussion or explanation, is ready to act in concert. Bartenieff believed that dance (particularly traditional dance) was uniquely suited to Lomax's type of analysis, since movement is "not only a medium of expression but also the essence of communication. Although all dancers feel intuitively that movement communicates across culture barriers, she wrote, there have hitherto been no means for describing dance patterns so that they could be consistently compared cross-culturally:
"The task on which we collaborated with Mr. Lomax was to adapt the Laban system to the problem of comparison of movement styles cross-culturally so that the main style families would emerge from the study of this visually perceived behavior on film, as in Cantometrics they had been found by study of aurally perceived behavior."
== Films == A series of short documentary films demonstrated some of the results of the team's statistical analysis in dramatic visual terms. These were: Dance & Human History (1974) (40 min.), which examined two important parameters in the Choreometric study, the dominant trace form of the movement and single/multiple articulation of the torso and relates them to geography and type of society; Palm Play (1977) (27 min.), which examines the use of the palm in dance cross culturally; Step Style (1977) (30 min.), which examines the use of the foot in dance cross culturally; and The Longest Trail (1984) (59 min.), which uses Choreometric data as evidence that the Americas were populated by Siberian hunters. In 2009 all four films were included on the DVD Rhythms of Earth: The Choreometrics Films of Alan Lomax and Forrestine Paulay produced by John Melville Bishop (Media-Generation, 1974–2008), which included old and new interviews with the original participants of the study. Improvisational jazz musician and composer Roswell Rudd later collaborated with Lomax and Paulay on an unpublished study called the Urban Strain that used Cantometric and Choreometric analysis to study commercially produced twentieth-century American popular music and dance.
== Criticisms and responses == The reaction of musicologists to Cantometrics was complex, as some critics questioned whether one could ever have enough statistics to prove anything about music and culture. One, Richard Middleton, called it an example of sociological homology. The musical examples for Cantometrics had not been chosen randomly, however, but for their representativeness, following the scholarly guidance of specialists who had studied the regions and /or supplied the audio or film clip samples. This was done because it was found that style tends to be very repetitive, and in most instances relatively few examples captured the stable performance norms, so that in most cases, coding many examples per culture yielded little new information. Lomax and Grauer settled on about ten examples per culture for Cantometrics, which had the largest dataset. Ten examples per culture usually sufficed, although for some cultures one or more sub-styles needed to be sampled as well. Alan Lomax himself stressed repeatedly that completeness of sampling was not the point:
The adequacy of any of these samples is . . . subject to this test: Will another sample of a similar kind taken in the same culture produce a similar performance profile? From this point of view, I believe that the majority of our samples will hold up. Even "secret" songs generally tend to be stylistically close to the more familiar music of a culture. The truth is that, with any one culture or subculture, singing is a rather standardized kind of behavior. It must be so since a main function of song is to . . . permit groups of performers to vocalize together and their listeners to share in a common experience. Cantometrics is a study of these standardized models, which describe singing rather than songs. Therefore, it is not primarily concerned with "complete" collections and descriptions, as are most scholarly endeavors, but with locating verifiable regularities and patterns. (Lomax [1968] 2000). Victor Grauer noted that: “Cantometrics is a statistical method. Its patterns and correlations are based on multiple instances, not just one. There will always be exceptions, which is why statistical methods are generally preferable for comparative studies than the close examination of individual examples.”