Editing Cantometrics (section)

==Branching out into Choreometrics==

Three chapters of ''Folk Song Style and Culture'' are devoted to Choreometrics. In chapter ten, "Dance, Style, and Culture," Lomax, Bartenieff, and Paulay describe the origin and meaning of the term: "In order to distinguish the level of this comparative study of movement from the levels where previous investigators have worked, we have given the method a freshly-coined designation, Choreometrics, meaning the measure of dance, or dance as a measure of culture.".<ref>Lomax (1968), p. 223</ref> They wrote that:
<blockquote>Choreometrics tests the proposition that dance is the most repetitious, redundant, and formally organized system of body communication present in a culture...  The dance is composed of those gestures, postures, movements, and movement qualities most characteristic and most essential to the activity of everyday, and thus crucial to cultural continuity. By treating these elements redundantly and formally, dance becomes an effective organizer of joint motor activity. Dance supplies the metronome to meter and regulates, or orders the energy and attention of groups of people, and thereby acquires the weight of general community approval. Thus dance functions to establish and renew consensus at moments when a society, without further discussion or explanation, is ready to act in concert.<ref>Lomax et al. (1968) p. 224.</ref></blockquote>

Bartenieff believed that dance (particularly traditional dance) was uniquely suited to Lomax's type of analysis, since movement is "not only a medium of expression but also the essence of communication. Although all dancers feel intuitively that movement communicates across culture barriers, she wrote, there have hitherto been no means for describing dance patterns so that they could be consistently compared cross-culturally:

<blockquote>"The task on which we collaborated with Mr. Lomax was to adapt the Laban system to the problem of comparison of movement styles cross-culturally so that the main style families would emerge from the study of this visually perceived behavior on film, as in Cantometrics they had been found by study of aurally perceived behavior."<ref>Irmgard Bartenieff, "Research in Anthropology: A Study of Dance Styles in Primitive Cultures", Cord Dance Research Annual I (1967).</ref></blockquote>