Factors of Musical Style

Lomax, Alan

doi:10.1515/9783110803211.29

Cited by 22 publications

(32 citation statements)

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“…Only extreme values of the character-states are shown, using numbers for ordinal characters and letters for nominal characters. Brackets show grouping of musical and social features into factors through factor analysis, and arrows show correlations between musical and social factors (adapted from Lomax, 1980, supplemented when necessary using Lomax, 1968, 1989and Lomax & Berkowitz, 1972. Dashed lines represent connections suggested elsewhere but not found in Lomax (1980).…”

Section: Statistical Analysesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…(a) Lomax's evolutionary interpretation of the relationships between his 10 "song-style regions". "African Gatherer" and "Siberian" song styles are interpreted as representing the two earliest roots of human song style, evolving over time with some admixture to eventually reach the most evolutionarily recent styles "Old High Culture" and "Western Europe" (adapted from Lomax, 1980). (b) My proposed revision of Lomax's model, replacing his assumption of evolutionary stasis with the modern cultural evolutionary concept of branching "descent with modification", using dashed arrows to incorporate the idea of horizontal transmission (e.g., cross-cultural borrowing).…”

Section: Emphasis Added)mentioning

confidence: 99%

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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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Section: Statistical Analysesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Emphasis Added)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Alan Lomax’s Cantometrics Project

Savage

2018

Music & Science

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“…Perhaps the most obvious fact about human song is that it varies considerably between cultures, and much less so within cultures (e.g. [ 3 ]). That is, each culture has both a shared, open-ended repertoire of specific songs, and culturally specific styles or idioms that encompass multiple songs.…”

Section: Four Core Components Of Musicalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Four principles of bio-musicology

Fitch

2015

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

114

100

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As a species-typical trait of Homo sapiens, musicality represents a cognitively complex and biologically grounded capacity worthy of intensive empirical investigation. Four principles are suggested here as prerequisites for a successful future discipline of bio-musicology. These involve adopting: (i) a multicomponent approach which recognizes that musicality is built upon a suite of interconnected capacities, of which none is primary; (ii) a pluralistic Tinbergian perspective that addresses and places equal weight on questions of mechanism, ontogeny, phylogeny and function; (iii) a comparative approach, which seeks and investigates animal homologues or analogues of specific components of musicality, wherever they can be found; and (iv) an ecologically motivated perspective, which recognizes the need to study widespread musical behaviours across a range of human cultures (and not focus solely on Western art music or skilled musicians). Given their pervasiveness, dance and music created for dancing should be considered central subcomponents of music, as should folk tunes, work songs, lullabies and children's songs. Although the precise breakdown of capacities required by the multicomponent approach remains open to debate, and different breakdowns may be appropriate to different purposes, I highlight four core components of human musicality—song, drumming, social synchronization and dance—as widespread and pervasive human abilities spanning across cultures, ages and levels of expertise. Each of these has interesting parallels in the animal kingdom (often analogies but in some cases apparent homologies also). Finally, I suggest that the search for universal capacities underlying human musicality, neglected for many years, should be renewed. The broad framework presented here illustrates the potential for a future discipline of bio-musicology as a rich field for interdisciplinary and comparative research.

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“…In the literature reviewed above we have seen comparative approaches of world music with relatively small corpora of audio recordings (Lomax, 1980;, and large-scale approaches focusing mainly on…”

Section: Critical Remarksmentioning

confidence: 99%

A review of manual and computational approaches for the study of world music corpora

Panteli

Benetos

Dixon

2018

Journal of New Music Research

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The comparison of world music cultures has been a recurring topic in the field of musicology since the end of the 19th century. Recent advances in technology in the field of Music Information Retrieval allow for a large-scale analysis of music corpora. We review manual and computational approaches in the literature that fall within the scope of music corpus research and world music analysis. With a large-scale computational music corpus analysis in mind we compare the tools and research questions addressed by each study and discuss strengths and weaknesses. Taking into account critical remarks from experts in the field and challenges involved in a large-scale computational analysis we discuss how this line of research can be improved in future work.

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Factors of Musical Style

Cited by 22 publications

References 0 publications

Alan Lomax’s Cantometrics Project

Alan Lomax’s Cantometrics Project

Four principles of bio-musicology

A review of manual and computational approaches for the study of world music corpora

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