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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
[5] They wrote that: Choreometrics tests the proposition that dance is the most repetitious, redundant, and formally organized system of body communication present in a culture...
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.
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.
), 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.
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.
With that end in view, during the 1990s he developed The Global Jukebox, an interactive multi-media computer program designed for classrooms, museums, and libraries to visually and aurally map the world's song and dance cultures, incidentally helping people understand their own roots and those of others, while teaching geography, anthropology, and tolerance through song and dance.