Cantometrics

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Cantometrics is a method created by Alan Lomax and a team of researchers to connect traditional vocal music with the social organization of cultures. Rather than focusing on Western musical ideas like pitch or rhythm, Cantometrics uses 37 style factors of vocal performance, rated on a five-point scale. Examples include how well a group sings together, how the vocal and instrumental parts are organized, vocal tension or relaxation, breathiness, phrase length, rasp, the balance of words versus vocables, and how much ornamentation (melisma) is used.

Lomax believed that voice quality is a key diagnostic element and that the way people sing reflects broader social and psychological patterns, such as the type of social organization, erotic life, and how children are treated. The project began publicly in 1959 at Columbia University. Early collaborators included musicologist Victor Grauer, with later contributions from Conrad Arensberg, Edwin Erickson, Barbara Ayres, and statistician Norman Berkowitz. The Choreometrics project, which studies dance, was developed with Laban movement notation expert Irmgard Bartenieff and dancer Forrestine Paulay.

In 1968 Lomax and his team published Folk Song Style and Culture, arguing that there are universal links between expressive behavior and social structure. They analyzed more than 4,000 songs from about 400 cultures, turning each song into a coded profile stored on computer punch cards. A related study of dance produced Choreometrics. The work led to maps of cultural patterns and the idea that musical style and social norms are connected, including aspects like gender relations and social hierarchy. The researchers found, for example, that sexually restrictive societies tended to show higher vocal tension and less group singing or polyphony, while societies with more open gender relations often featured multipart singing and stronger group cohesion.

To gather data, the team selected roughly ten songs per culture, aiming for enough samples to reveal stable patterns, though exact sampling varied by culture. Some critics questioned whether statistics could capture music, but Cantometrics proponents argued that their statistical approach was appropriate for comparing cultures and that repeated samples tended to give similar results.

Cantometrics helped launch related projects, such as Parlametrics, Phonotactics, and Minutage, and it inspired Choreometrics, the study of dance. The team also produced teaching tapes to help people understand world music and how to analyze song profiles. Lomax envisioned using computers to make Cantometrics available to students and the general public, not just scholars. In the 1990s he developed The Global Jukebox, a multimedia program designed for classrooms and museums to map the world’s songs and dances. After Lomax’s death in 2002, The Association for Cultural Equity has worked to update and widely share the archive, with plans to stream the recordings online.