Cantometrics

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Related articles Ethnographic film Video ethnography Ethnocinema List of ethnographic films Margaret Mead Film Festival Cantometrics Museum anthropology Salvage ethnography Tribal art/Folk art
Major theorists Tim Asch Gregory Bateson Franz Boas Pierre Bourdieu John Collier Frances Densmore Robert J. Flaherty Robert Gardner Alfred Gell Robert Hugh Layton Claude Lévi-Strauss Alan Lomax John Marshall Margaret Mead Alan Merriam Bruno Nettl Hortense Powdermaker Jean Rouch David MacDougall
Social and cultural anthropology
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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. Lomax defined Cantometrics as the study of singing as normative expressive behavior and maintained that Cantometrics reveals folk performance style to be a "systems-maintaining framework" which models key patterns of co-action in everyday life. His work on Cantometrics gave rise to further comparative studies of aspects of human communication in relation to culture, including: Choreometrics, Parlametrics, Phonotactics (an analysis of vowel frequency in speech), and Minutage (a study of breath management).

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. The vocal style factors were designed to be easily rated by observers on a five-point scale according to their presence or absence. 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.) 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"^[1]