Editing Cantometrics (section)

==Results==

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The Cantometric study of song revealed strong statistical relations between song style and social norms. Alan Lomax stated that the Cantometrics analysis amply justified his original hypothesis that sexually restrictive and highly punitive societies correlated with degree of vocal tension. The tendency to sing together in groups, tonal cohesiveness, and the likelihood of polyphonic singing were all associated with fewer restrictions on women. Multipart singing occurs in societies where the sexes have a complementary relationship.

Other results included strong correlations between length of phrase and precision of articulation, and degree of ornamentation with social stratification. It was found that explicitness or the information load of song varies with the level of economic productivity of the subsistence system.

Murdock's taxonomy encoded the economic, social, and political features of more than 1,100 societies that ethnologists had studied up until that time. In many cases, these codes formed scales – for example, the one concerning the number of levels of political authority outside the local community, from 0 among hunters, to 4 for irrigation empires. Lomax and Arensberg arranged the codes into scales in order to measure the kinds of behaviors of features of culture, such as levels of  production or permanence of settlement.  When they added factors of expressive communication  to the Murdock  measures of social relations it produced a geographical taxonomy of human culture.