Alan Lomax and Cantometrics: Revisiting a Landmark Data Source in Ethnomusicology

When most empirical researchers in the arts think of Alan Lomax (1915-2002)-which is probably not often, or not often enough-they might envision a man in a rumpled suit, hauling a reel-to-reel tape machine in the backseat of his car, bound for Appalachia or the Mississippi Delta to record a folk or blues artist. Or maybe they picture him in a hotel room, asking questions and scribbling in a notebook, while Lead Belly or Muddy Waters looks on in mild bemusement.

For researchers accustomed to using economic or psychometric tools in the study of arts and cultural phenomena, Lomax's approach may seem quintessentially qualitative. His research relied, after all, on fieldwork: interviews, transcriptions, thematic coding. Nevertheless, from the 1960s onward, this titan of American ethnomusicology turned increasingly to statistical methods for his research.

In doing so, Lomax helped birth an analytical project called "cantometrics." In a 2018 article reviewing his findings, the authors begin by calling cantometrics "arguably both the most ambitious and the most controversial undertaking in music and science that the world has known." Lomax's idea was to classify the musical styles of thousands upon thousands of regional songs, worldwide, and to correlate those styles with the structures of societies from which the music emerged.

Lomax and his team started publishing their results in the late 1960s. By 1972, in a UNESCO paper titled "An Appeal for Cultural Equity," he declared that cantometrics had exposed two principles:

First, it is now clear that culture and song styles change together, that expressive style is firmly rooted in regional and real culture developments, and that it can be thought of in relation to the great regional human traditions…. Second, each of these [musical] style areas has clear-cut geographical boundaries and thus, a general environmental character and distinctive socioeconomic problems.

Why was Lomax so keen on showing-through multivariate analysis-that musical traditions are inseparable from geographical areas and socioeconomic norms? In the same paper, Lomax put it this way:

All cultures need their fair share of the air-time. When country folk or tribal peoples hear or view their own traditions in the big media, projected with the authority generally reserved for the output of large urban centers, and when they hear their traditions taught to their own children, something magical occurs.

For Lomax, cantometrics ensured a data-driven "rationale for the advocacy of planetary cultural and expressive equity." By quantifying music's stylistic elements and associating them with discrete geospatial and societal boundaries, Lomax and his team thought they were validating expressive traditions that otherwise would get steamrolled by mass culture.

Cantometrics, in Lomax's view, also permitted comparisons across societies and cultures-a function he deemed necessary for realizing his dream of "manifold civilizations animated by the vision of cultural equity." But to him, this pluralist ideal was not abstract; it required empirical chops. Any "concern for both the folk artists and their heritages," he wrote, "must be knowledgeable, both about the fit of each genre to its local context and about its roots in one or more of the great stylistic traditions of humankind."

Since Lomax's death, the Association of Cultural Equity (ACE), which he founded, has continued maintaining, updating, and querying the data sources that informed the original cantometric analyses. In partnership with the Library of Congress and other entities, ACE is the custodian of the Alan Lomax Archive, preserving and publicly sharing thousands of recordings of music, dance, and the spoken word for the benefit of scholars, artists, and the general public alike. Through grant awards, NEA has supported this work, which includes distribution of content through The Global Jukebox, an interactive web resource availing of cantometrics.

According to ACE's website, "the Jukebox is for those who ask, as we do, what can aesthetic patterns reveal about the kinship between peoples over time?" Last November, the online journal PLOS One published a substantial re-analysis of Lomax's core datasets. The article coincided with the release of the full original datasets-cleaned and checked for reliability-along with user tools and "seven additional datasets coding and describing instrumentation, conversation, popular music, vowel and consonant placement, breath management, social factors, and societies."

The paper, whose lead author is Anna L.C. Wood-Lomax's daughter, an ethnomusicologist in her own right-directly addresses several criticisms that erupted when the earlier analyses were published. Most of those concerns had to do with data-coding quality control and the validity of Lomax's constructs.

With Wood's paper, not only have voluminous data and metadata become publicly accessible for the first time; the characterizations of song styles and societal structure have been enriched with additional descriptive data. Consequently, "songs were assigned to narrower and more accurate societal groupings with new coordinates," the article states.

It is ironic, then, that even while allaying concerns with the original analysis, the paper makes claims that might be open to a new line of criticism. The authors tackle complaints that the original analysis may have overlooked the role of "autocorrelation"-that is, pre-existing relationships between societies (in terms of a common history or frequent interactions)-in determining the link between song style and societal structure. Controlling for these variables, the researchers apparently confirm a set of Lomax's key findings: that "global song style is correlated with social complexity." Here, in Lomax's words, is the relevant conclusion:

Song style tends to grow more articulated, ornamented, heavily orchestrated, and exclusive as societies grow bigger, more productive, more urbanized, and more stratified. Specifically, (1) the level of text repetition decreases directly as productivity increases, (2) the level of precision of enunciation increases as states grow in size, (3) the prominence of small intervals and embellishments indicates the level of stratification, (4) orchestral complexity symbolizes state power, and (5) melodic form and complexity reflect the size and subsistence base of a community.

One is awed by the elaborate methodology that ACE has deployed to interrogate these findings-and yet, any generalization of "social complexity" and supposed affinity with stylistic complexity, in music, is itself likely to attract skeptics. For all that, ACE has provided ample opportunity, through the Global Jukebox, for cultural researchers to agree or disagree after seeing-and hearing-for themselves.

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