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Alan Lomax' monumental investigation of world arts and cultures, begun in the 1950s and continuing until his death, was unprecedented in its scope and rigor. Nothing had been done like it before or since. With the collaboration of anthropologists Conrad Arensberg and Margaret Mead, musicologists Roswell Rudd and Victor Grauer, and mathematician Norman Berkowitz, he found non-technical ways of listening to the diverse musics of the world, a common language vocabulary to describe the observations, and a statistical model to cluster song style geographically and in relation to means of subsistence and social organization- a system he called Cantometrics. In collaboration with Irmagard Bartinieff and Forrestine Pauley, he continued this research into dance and Choreometrics.
Four films came from Choreometric project: Dance and Human History, Step Style, Palm Play, and The Longest Trail. These four films are on the Rhythms of Earth DVD set, plus a new video about the history, context, and methods of the research.