Caveat on Causes and Correlations

Kealiinohomoku, Joann W.; Williams, Drid; Lomax, Alan

doi:10.2307/1477601

Cited by 11 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…My goal in this article is to produce such an overview by summarizing Lomax’s own work and its criticisms in light of these recent studies and related developments that have occurred during the half century since Lomax began his work. Because Lomax’s forays into dance (choreometrics) and other domains were less comprehensive and more heavily criticized than his flagship cantometric analysis of traditional folk songs (e.g., Kaeppler, 1978; Kealiinohomoku, 1974; Williams, 1974; Youngerman, 1974), I will focus the bulk of the article primarily on cantometrics, but I will also suggest possibilities for re-extending the analysis into other domains of art and culture. By understanding why Lomax’s vision of an interdisciplinary, global synthesis of science and art failed to take off half a century ago, we may find ourselves better able to try a new approach in today’s new intellectual climate of revived interest in the digital humanities and cultural evolution.…”

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confidence: 99%

Alan Lomax’s Cantometrics Project

Savage

2018

Music & Science

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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.

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confidence: 99%

Alan Lomax’s Cantometrics Project

Savage

2018

Music & Science

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“…‘Lomax’s hypothesis’, Kealiinohomoku wrote, ‘is useful only for areas that are culturally homogenous, where there has been little acculturation and minimal technological change. Surely there are few such societies today’ (Kealiinohomoku, 1974). How, for example, could Choremetrics’ model account for the creolization occasioned not by media pollution, but by the arrival of West Africans in the Americas through the slave trade?…”

Section: Writing Practices Embodied History and The Ironies Of Cultumentioning

confidence: 99%

The living record: Alan Lomax and the world archive of movement

Laemmli

2018

History of the Human Sciences

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In 1965, the American folklorist Alan Lomax set out on a mission: to view, code, catalogue and preserve the totality of the world’s dance traditions. Believing that dance carried otherwise inaccessible information about social structures, work practices and the history of human migration, Lomax and his collaborators gathered more than 250,000 feet of raw film footage and analyzed it using a new system of movement analysis. Lomax’s aims, however, went beyond the merely scientific. He hoped to use his ‘Choreometrics’ project as the foundation for a universally available visual and textual atlas of human movement. This article explores how Lomax’s archival ambitions supported his efforts to enact a wholesale ‘recalibration of the human perceptual apparatus’ and situates Choreometrics at the nexus of new techniques of data-gathering and the cultural ferment of the 1960s.

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“…The contrasts between the choreametrics project in the 1960s (Lomax, 1968) and the approach to cultural study evidenced in Body, Movement andCulture, published in 1990 (Ness, 1990) demonstrate a significant advancement in the use ofLMA as a tool for anthropological analysis. Lomax's choreometrics project has been criticized for its speculative generalizations based on insufficient samples and its tendency to mistake correlation between work and dance actions for indication that the former causes the latter (Kealiinohomoku, 1974). Ness writes insightfully and sensitively about a ritual dance known as "Sinulog," performed throughout the Central Philipines, drawing from her own experiences, observations, and interviews to overtly identify her methods and point of view.…”

Section: Distilling the Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Laban Movement Analysis: Charting the Ineffable Domain of human Movement

Groff

1995

Journal of Physical Education, Recreation & Dance

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Caveat on Causes and Correlations

Cited by 11 publications

References 0 publications

Alan Lomax’s Cantometrics Project

Alan Lomax’s Cantometrics Project

The living record: Alan Lomax and the world archive of movement

Laban Movement Analysis: Charting the Ineffable Domain of human Movement

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