Alan Lomax’s Cantometrics Project

Abstract

Alan Lomax's Cantometrics Project was arguably both the most ambitious and the most controversial undertaking in music and science that the world has known. Its flagship component, Lomax's "cantometric" analysis of approximately 1,800 songs from 148 worldwide populations using 36 classificatory features, sparked extensive debate. While Lomax responded to some criticisms, neither his final conclusions nor the evidence on which they were based were ever fully made clear. For decades, neither cantometrics nor Lomax's related projects involving dance, speech, popular music, digital humanities, pedagogy, and activism were widely adopted by other researchers, but there has been a resurgence of interest since Lomax's death in 2002. Here, I provide a comprehensive critical review of the Cantometrics Project, focusing on issues regarding the song sample, classification scheme, statistical analyses, interpretation, and ethnocentrism/reductionism. I identify misunderstandings, improvements that were made, and criticisms that remain to be addressed, and distil Lomax's sometimes-conflicting claims into diagrams summarizing his three primary results: (1) ten regional song-style types, (2) nine musical factors representing intra-musical correlations, and (3) correlations between these musical factors and five factors of social structure. Although Lomax's interpretations regarding correlations between song style and social structure appear weakly supported, his historical interpretations regarding connections ranging from colonial diaspora to ancient migrations provide a more promising starting point for both research and teaching about the global arts. While Lomax's attempts to correlate features of social structure such as gender, religion, politics, and economics with stylistic features of musical performance largely failed to gain acceptance, the Cantometrics Project can still provide both inspiration and cautionary lessons for future exploration of relationships between music and culture.

Automatic comparison of global children’s and adult songs supports a sensorimotor hypothesis for the origin of musical scales

“…Although many studies of children's musical perception have been performed, there are only a handful of quantitative musicological studies of children's songs. In previous research, scales, melodic ranges, and other aspects of 100 children's songs from around the world were analyzed using the Cantometrics classification scheme [10,15]. However, this study was limited to manual analysis and children's songs were not directly compared with adult songs.…”

An overview of cross-cultural music corpus studies

“…This analysis revealed several cross-cultural similarities in the mechanisms of melodic evolution despite major differences in the specific tonal systems used (Savage 2017; Savage, Currie, and Atkinson, In preparation). More ambitiously still, Alan Lomax attempted to apply new computer power not to symbolic music notation but to audio recordings from across the globe (Savage 2018). By this point, several generations of musicologists since the founding of the Berlin Phonogram and technological improvements such as the advent of LP recordings had resulted in a much larger and higher quality sample of recordings from around the world.…”

Human vs. automated judgements of cross-cultural musical similarity

“…We hypothesize that our algorithmic results will be more consistent with perceptual data once data from many participants is averaged and the algorithm is trained on a cross-cultural musical sample as in [2]. However, we still suspect that correlations with perceptual ratings may remain weak until we develop new algorithms and features based on more universal musical theories rather than ones designed primarily for Western music [3,4].…”