Cantometrics

Cantometrics was a method that sought to compare and classify the folk song styles of the world through scientific methods. Led by Alan Lomax, the project involved an interdisciplinary team of musicologists, linguists, anthropologists, statisticians, computer programmers, and dance ethnologists. Its research team reviewed over 4,000 recordings from approximately 250 cultures. It argued that music symbolizes culture and suggested that a culture's folk song style parallels its organizational structure. Cantometrics research also extended to analytic techniques of movement and dance (choreometrics), lyric content, and concept analysis (phonotactics). Its armchair approach to ethnomusicology contrasted with the discipline's prevailing practices (long-term study of a single music culture) of the period.

Cantometrics decried the limits of Western musical notation, arguing that it inadequately demonstrates the salient features of a folk music. It asked fellow scholars to attend to performance practices rather than to discrete musicological analysis. Lomax introduced his ideas about musical style as patterns in musical behavior, or habits, surrounding all behaviors and aspects of the musical event. He considered song more worthy of study than speech because of its assumed redundancy. And he considered the study of folk song over that of instrumental music because he considered the latter an offshoot of the former. Cantometrics argued that song style is predictive of appropriate behaviors for a given culture. Lomax argued that while certain musical elements may be taken into a culture from another, music cultures fundamentally retain their “overall musical effect” because of unique musical style.

Lomax was inspired by his fieldwork trips to Spain and Italy in the 1950s. He noted that variations in performance practice correlated with sexual mores, the position of women, and the treatment of children. In his Cantometrics research, then, he sought to further study the relationships between style and social structure. Cantometrics research began in the summer of 1961 under the sponsorship of the Rockefeller Foundation's Humanities Division.

The project's first discovery was a system for tracking the assonance pattern of sung verse, which later led to the development of a song style classification system. Also that first summer, Lomax and Victor Grauer, his research assistant, developed a coding system for measuring the performance practices of a culture. They collaboratively tested these ratings on a sample of about 700 songs. Starting in 1962, the Cantometrics team began to match their song data to the George P. Murdock Ethnographic Atlas data (e.g., family organization; sex behavior premarital), and accordingly, they categorized the world's folk song styles into 10 families: (1) American Indian, (2) Pygmoid, (3) African, (4) Australian, (5) Melanesian, (6) Polynesian, (7) Malayan, (8) Eurasian, (9) old European, and (10) modern European.

Lomax and Grauer based the Cantometrics coding system exclusively on auditory information that could be perceived by nonspecialists. They wrote the first version of the coding book in 1961 and later included it as a chapter in the book Folk Song Style and Culture. The coding sheet consisted of 37 lines (later 36), each representing a descriptive characteristic that pertained to communalism versus individualism (e.g., social relationship between instruments and voices), choral blend (e.g., tonal blend of the vocal parts), voice quality (e.g., nasalization), use of body, performance setting, melodic qualities (e.g., melodic shape), and rhythmic qualities (e.g., rhythmic structure of vocal parts).

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