Music in the Social and Behavioral

Sciences: An Encyclopedia
Cantometrics

Contributors: Amanda L. Scherbenske

Editors: William Forde Thompson
Book Title: Music in the Social and Behavioral Sciences: An Encyclopedia
Chapter Title: "Cantometrics"
Pub. Date: 2014
Access Date: December 15, 2014
Publishing Company: SAGE Publications, Inc.
City: Thousand Oaks
Print ISBN: 9781452283036
Online ISBN: 9781452283012
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781452283012.n58
Print pages: 166-168
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Music in Social and Behavioral
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http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781452283012.n58Wesleyan University
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

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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).

[p. 166 ↓ ] The coding sheets were used to create numerical master profiles for each
culture to be compared cross-culturally. Lomax compared the African and the Afro-
American stylistic profiles to demonstrate the coding sheets' usefulness in accounting
for questions involving musical acculturation. He asserted that the European strophic
form, for example, impressed Africans in the New World; they thus incorporated
it as part of their musical references. Lomax and Grauer intended for students to
learn the system through a series of training tapes, which were issued with the book
Cantometrics: An Approach to the Anthropology of Music.

Facilitators of the Cantometrics Project

Several prominent scholars influenced and supported Cantometrics. Lomax attended
lectures by Curt Sachs, a founder of comparative musicology, at New York University in
the 1930s. Lomax's study with the linguist Ray Birdwhistell shortly before undertaking
the Cantometrics research inspired him to consider the paramusical factors of song
performance. Anthropologist Margaret Mead was influential in the creation of song
profiles that could be visually represented on IBM punch cards. Conrad Arensberg,

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codirector of Cantometrics and professor of anthropology at Columbia University,

helped Lomax formulate his hypothesis, which proposed that social structure of
performance practice mirrored the complexity of a society's political structure.
Performances without specified leaders, for example, were characteristic of societies
with simple political organizations.

Technological advances also facilitated the Cantometrics project. The invention of

the portable magnetic tape recorder made high-fidelity sound recording accessible to
many. It aided in the field recording of musical styles from around the world. Many of
the recordings that the Cantometrics research team analyzed came from such field
recordings, as well as from the record label Folkways Records. New sound recording
technologies of the day, such as the visible speech machine and the electromyograph,
also allowed for the scientific study of world folk song styles.

Several grant-issuing and academic institutions sponsored Cantometrics for over

20 years. It received support from the National Institute of Mental Health (1963–76),
American Council of Learned Societies (1960–61), and the Rockefeller Foundation
(1962, 1975, 1977–78). Finally, Columbia University harbored the project at its Center
for Social Sciences, where Lomax served as a research associate in the Department of
Anthropology from 1962 to 1989.

The findings of the project were presented through a series of academic publications
and conference talks. Margaret Mead invited Lomax to give a talk on his research
on style and sexual mores at the 1958 American Anthropological Association annual
meeting. Lomax's article “Song Structure and Social Structure” (1962) is based on the
paper he read at the Society for Ethnomusicology annual meeting in 1961. Much of the
content of Folk Song Style and Culture was introduced through a series of panels at
the American Anthropological Association annual meeting in 1966 titled “Frontiers of
Anthropology: Cantometrics and Culture.”

The academic reception of Cantometrics was mixed. A number of influential

ethnomusicologists praised the work for its trailblazing comparative efforts, as well as
the didactic potential of its training tapes. In 1969, Alan Merriam applauded it for the
study of music as learned, human behavior; he warned, however, “ethnomusicologists
will ignore this book at their own peril.” Nonetheless, Cantometrics received strident

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critiques accusing it of Western cultural and gender bias, small sample size, and lack
of data from China. Cantometrics was also reproached for dismissing data that did not
align with its hypothesis.

Amanda L.Scherbenske, Wesleyan University

http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781452283012.n58
See Also:

• Comparative Musicology
• Computer-Aided Musical Analysis
• Database Studies
• Ethnomusicology and Ethnomusicologists
• Fieldwork
• Music Culture
• Song
• Style

Further Readings

Lomax, A. Cantometrics: An Approach to the Anthropology of Music . Berkeley:

University of California Extension Media Center, 1976.

Lomax, A. “Folk Song Style.” American Anthropologist , v.61/6 (1959). http://

dx.doi.org/10.1525/aa.1959.61.6.02a00030

Lomax, A. Folk Song Style and Culture . Washington, DC: American Association for the
Advancement of Science, 1968.

Lomax, A. “Song Structure and Social Structure.” Ethnology , v.1/4 (1962). http://
dx.doi.org/10.2307/3772850

Merriam, A. “Review of ‘Folk Song Style and Culture.’” Journal of American Folklore ,
v.82/326 (1969). http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/539790

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