Cantometrics
Encyclopedia
Cantometrics is a method for relating the statistical analysis of (primarily) sonic elements of tradition
al vocal music (or folk songs
) to the statistical analysis (using computers) of sociological
traits, largely as those traits are defined and organized via the Human Relations Area Files
. Developed primarily by Alan Lomax, cantometrics thus attempts to relate regularities of musical style (or musical organization) to social organization and also to historical factors by establishing correlations between easily observable style factors as, for example, vocal quality (such as tense or relaxed), tessitura
, textual coherence (presence and percentage of vocables versus meaningful words), melodic contour
, on the one hand, with class
stratification
, gender relations
, and sexual mores
on the other.
In the early stages of his work on the Cantometrics coding system, Lomax wrote of the relationship of musical style to culture:
Cantometrics is the study of singing as normative expressive behavior and of folk song style as a "systems-maintaining framework" which models key patterns of co-action in everyday life. It gave rise to further comparative studies of human communication in relation to culture including: orchestral organization, Choreometrics, Parlametrics, Phonotactics (an analysis of vowel frequency in speech), and Minutage (a study of breath management).
First publicly proposed in 1959 by Lomax, who then 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 co-creator of the Cantometrics computer coding system. Other members of the project included distinguished anthropologist Conrad Arensberg of Columbia University, a founder of Applied anthropology
; anthropologists Edwin Erickson and Barbara Ayres; statistician Norman Berkowitz, Laban shape notation specialist Irmgard Bartenieff and dancer and movement therapist Forrestine Paulay, who co-created the Choreometrics movement coding system. In 1968 Lomax, et al., published Folk Song Style and Culture, in which they claimed 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". Jazz musician and composer Roswell Rudd
later collaborated with Lomax and Paulay on an unpublished study of popular music and movement called the Urban Strain that used insights and methods of analysis developed by Cantometrics and Choreometrics.
The Cantometrics team also created a set of teaching tapes that make it easy to develop an understanding of world music and to create new song profiles. Alan Lomax, Victor Grauer, and Roswell Rudd were the primary song analysts on the Cantometrics project The three educated their ears by listening to and coding thousands of songs from all corners of the globe. “Cantometrics helps you to break music down into its parts,” Roswell Rudd told Gideon D’Arcangelo. “You want to know how it’s put together and then you want to know where the parts came from. The Cantometrics teaching tapes are the best thing anybody can use who wants to understand world music, classical music, pop music, whatever. That teaching kit teaches you about the qualities of music – any kind of music from any culture.”
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 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:
Tradition
A tradition is a ritual, belief or object passed down within a society, still maintained in the present, with origins in the past. Common examples include holidays or impractical but socially meaningful clothes , but the idea has also been applied to social norms such as greetings...
al vocal music (or folk songs
Folk music
Folk music is an English term encompassing both traditional folk music and contemporary folk music. The term originated in the 19th century. Traditional folk music has been defined in several ways: as music transmitted by mouth, as music of the lower classes, and as music with unknown composers....
) to the statistical analysis (using computers) of sociological
Sociology
Sociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—which uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about human social activity...
traits, largely as those traits are defined and organized via the Human Relations Area Files
Human Relations Area Files
The Human Relations Area Files, Inc. , located in New Haven, Connecticut is a nonprofit international membership organization with over 300 member institutions in the U.S. and more than 20 other countries...
. Developed primarily by Alan Lomax, cantometrics thus attempts to relate regularities of musical style (or musical organization) to social organization and also to historical factors by establishing correlations between easily observable style factors as, for example, vocal quality (such as tense or relaxed), tessitura
Tessitura
In music, the term tessitura generally describes the most musically acceptable and comfortable range for a given singer or, less frequently, musical instrument; the range in which a given type of voice presents its best-sounding texture or timbre...
, textual coherence (presence and percentage of vocables versus meaningful words), melodic contour
Melodic motion
Complex melodic motion is the quality of movement of a melody, including nearness or farness of successive pitches or notes in a melody. This may be described as conjunct or disjunct, stepwise or skipwise, respectively and involves the use of the complex number, i, in its calculation.Bruno Nettl ...
, on the one hand, with class
Social class
Social classes are economic or cultural arrangements of groups in society. Class is an essential object of analysis for sociologists, political scientists, economists, anthropologists and social historians. In the social sciences, social class is often discussed in terms of 'social stratification'...
stratification
Social stratification
In sociology the social stratification is a concept of class, involving the "classification of persons into groups based on shared socio-economic conditions ... a relational set of inequalities with economic, social, political and ideological dimensions."...
, gender relations
Gender role
Gender roles refer to the set of social and behavioral norms that are considered to be socially appropriate for individuals of a specific sex in the context of a specific culture, which differ widely between cultures and over time...
, and sexual mores
Sexual norm
A sexual norm can refer to a personal or a social norm. Most cultures have social norms regarding sexuality, and define normal sexuality to consist only of certain legal sex acts between individuals who meet specific criteria of age, consanguinity , race/ethnicity A sexual norm can refer to a...
on the other.
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"
Cantometrics is the study of singing as normative expressive behavior and of folk song style as a "systems-maintaining framework" which models key patterns of co-action in everyday life. It gave rise to further comparative studies of human communication in relation to culture including: orchestral organization, Choreometrics, Parlametrics, Phonotactics (an analysis of vowel frequency in speech), and Minutage (a study of breath management).
First publicly proposed in 1959 by Lomax, who then 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 co-creator of the Cantometrics computer coding system. Other members of the project included distinguished anthropologist Conrad Arensberg of Columbia University, a founder of Applied anthropology
Applied anthropology
Applied anthropology refers to the application of the method and theory of anthropology to the analysis and solution of practical problems. In as much as anthropology traditionally entails four sub-disciplines--Archaeology, biological/physical, cultural/social, and linguistic anthropology—the...
; anthropologists Edwin Erickson and Barbara Ayres; statistician Norman Berkowitz, Laban shape notation specialist Irmgard Bartenieff and dancer and movement therapist Forrestine Paulay, who co-created the Choreometrics movement coding system. In 1968 Lomax, et al., published Folk Song Style and Culture, in which they claimed 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". Jazz musician and composer Roswell Rudd
Roswell Rudd
Roswell Rudd is a Grammy Award-nominated American jazz trombonist and composer....
later collaborated with Lomax and Paulay on an unpublished study of popular music and movement called the Urban Strain that used insights and methods of analysis developed by Cantometrics and Choreometrics.
The Cantometrics team also created a set of teaching tapes that make it easy to develop an understanding of world music and to create new song profiles. Alan Lomax, Victor Grauer, and Roswell Rudd were the primary song analysts on the Cantometrics project The three educated their ears by listening to and coding thousands of songs from all corners of the globe. “Cantometrics helps you to break music down into its parts,” Roswell Rudd told Gideon D’Arcangelo. “You want to know how it’s put together and then you want to know where the parts came from. The Cantometrics teaching tapes are the best thing anybody can use who wants to understand world music, classical music, pop music, whatever. That teaching kit teaches you about the qualities of music – any kind of music from any culture.”
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
Homology (sociology)
Homologies are "structural 'resonances'...between the different elements making up a socio-cultural whole." Examples include Alan Lomax's cantometrics, which:...
.
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 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).
Further reading
- Lomax, Alan (1959)."Folk Song Style." American Anthropologist 61 (Dec. 1959): 927-54.
- Lomax, Alan (1968). Folk Song Style and Culture. New Brunswick, U.S.A.: Transaction Publishers, 2000. ISBN 0-87855-640-0
- Lomax, Alan and Edith Crowell Trager "Phonotactique Du Chant Populaire." L’Homme: Revue Francaise d’Anthropologie, (April 1964): 1–55.
- Grauer, Victor A. "Some Song-Style Clusters: A Preliminary Study". Ethnomusicology 9 (1965): 265–71.
- Lomax, Alan with Irmgard Bartenieff and Forrestine Paulay. "Choreometrics: A Method for the Study of Cross-Cultural Pattern in Film." Sonderdruck aus Research Film (1969) 6: 515–17.
- Erickson, Edwin E. "The Song Trace: Song Styles and the Ethnohistory of Aboriginal America." Ph. D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1969-70 [Abstract in Dissertation Abstracts International 30, no. 9 (1970): 4471–72 B].
- Lomax, Alan and Norman Berkowitz. "The Evolutionary Taxonomy of Culture." Science 177 (July 21, 1972): 228–39
- Middleton, Richard (1990/2002). Studying Popular Music. Philadelphia: Open University Press. ISBN 0-335-15275-9.
- Grauer, Victor. "Song and Social Culture, A Response". Musical Traditions web magazine, July 27, 2005