Cantometrics relates folk music to sociological traits, arguing that the characteristics of a culture's traditional music reflect that culture's social organization, including classstratification, gender relations, and sexual mores. This is an example of sociological homology.
Further Reading
Middleton, Richard (1990/2002). Studying Popular Music. Philadelphia: Open University Press. ISBN 0335152759.
Lomax, Alan (1959). "Folk Song Style." American Anthropologist 61 (Dec. 1959): 927-54. [1] (http://www.alan-lomax.com/style_cantometrics.html)
Cantometrics, Choreometrics, and Parlametrics were designed as lively, democratic methods of teaching world culture through its expressive systems - that is, using universally observable criteria, rather than through the lens of Western music or dance theories.
Following a brief explanation of the Cantometrics system, evidence for the argument is provided from six stylistic groups: (1) solo and non-specific, (2) choral, acephalous, and non-specific, (3) choral, acephalous, non-specific, and integrated, (4) unison, non-specific, and poorly integrated, (5) antiphonal, integrated, polyphonic, large choral performance, and (6) elaborate, melodically complex, constricted, specific, and exclusive.
Therefore, the approach of Cantometrics, which studies the social, formal, and presentational aspects of songs in relation to their song-producing cultures, is more informative than traditional studies of songs in terms of pitch and rhythm.
Cantometrics: A Method in Musical Anthropology represents the culmination of the work of Alan Lomax on this topic at its time of publication in 1976.
Cantometrics is a term created by Lomax to describe the measurement of song, specifically the measurement of song style.
After describing the method for developing the Cantometric measures and the general cultural correlations, Lomax goes on to list the ten song regions, identify their global locations, cross-cultural influences and list some of the characteristic measures that define the region.
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