Savage

AAWM JOURNAL VOL. 2 NO. 1 (2012)

CantoCore: A New Cross-Cultural Song Classification Scheme

Patrick E. Savage, Emily Merritt, Tom Rzeszutek, and Steven Brown

---

Abstract:

Classification of organisms and languages has long provided the foundation for studying biological and cultural history, but there is still no accepted scheme for classifying songs crossculturally. The best candidate, Lomax and Grauer’s “Cantometrics” coding scheme, did not spawn a large following due, in part, to concerns about its reliability. We present here a new classification scheme, called “CantoCore”, that is inspired by Cantometrics but that emphasizes its “core” structural characters rather than the more subjective characters of performance style. Using both schemes to classify the 30 songs from the Cantometrics Consensus Tape, we found that CantoCore appeared to be approximately 80% more reliable than Cantometrics.

Nevertheless, Cantometrics still demonstrated significant reliability for all but its instrumental characters. Future multidisciplinary applications of CantoCore and Cantometrics to the crosscultural study of musical similarity, musical evolution, musical universals, and the relationship between music and culture will provide the true test of each scheme’s value.

Read full article in PDF version

Contributor Information:

Patrick Savage graduated with an M.Sc. in Psychology, Neuroscience and Behaviour from McMaster University in 2011. He is currently a graduate student in the Musicology Department of the Tokyo University of the Arts.

Emily Merritt is a Music Cognition major at McMaster University. She is scheduled to graduate in 2012.

Tom Rzeszutek graduated with an M.Sc. in Psychology, Neuroscience and Behaviour from McMaster University in 2011.

Steven Brown is the director of the NeuroArts Lab in the McMaster University Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour. The lab is devoted to developing a holistic understanding of the neural, cognitive and evolutionary foundations of the arts.

© 2012 by the author. Users may read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of this article without requesting permission. When distributing, (1) the author of the article and the name, volume, issue, and year of the journal must be identified clearly; (2) no portion of the article, including audio, video, or other accompanying media, may be used for commercial purposes; and (3) no portion of the article or any of its accompanying media may be modified, transformed, built upon, sampled, remixed, or separated from the rest of the article.

---