A large-scale comparative study of folk songs around the world employing systematic measures (cantometrics). The aim was not just to describe variation but to test hypotheses about the relationships between song style and societal structures. Dance was also considered.

This chapter examines the relationship between social cohesion (measured using variables like subsistence type, stable work teams, and settlement patterns) and musical cohesion. All hypotheses are supported.

This chapter explores the relationship between cultural complexity and song. Several measures of cultural complexity are correlated with different aspects of singing. All hypotheses are supported.

The author reanalyzes hypotheses proposed by Lomax et al. (1968) that are based on Lomax's collection of cantometric data. Considering historical/regional variables, the author suggests that difusion and common history better explain certain musical features such as wordiness than functional and evolutionary processes. However, other Lomax findings are supported involving interlocked, contrapuntal singing and narrow nasal-voiced singing.

This chapter suggests that dance styles reflect cultural traits. The authors hypothesize that certain aspects of cultural complexity predict several types of dance movement. Hypotheses are supported.

By testing relationships between musical, geographic, genetic, and linguistic distance among nine indigenous groups in Taiwan, the researchers aim to quantitatively evaluate a developing theory of coevolution between these traits. An especially strong correlation between musical variability and genetic distance suggests that music may possess worldwide time depth, diversity, and universality equal to or greater than that of language, and could thus serve as a complementary marker for reconstruction of long-term population shifts.

This paper seeks to identify how different practices of food sharing are related to one another, and the degree to which societies in North and South America may share practices with one another. The authors attempt this by using ethnographic literature to break sharing activities down into their constituent, multi-stage parts, and then comparing the prevalence of these parts and their relationships to one another. The study finds that the presence or absence of a distributor in a sharing activity, and who that distributor is, has a significant effect on how sharing is carried out. On the other hand, linguistic relationships between groups seem to have little impact on their sharing practices, and geographic proximity between groups only seems to have a significant effect on sharing practices in North America.

In order to investigate cross-cultural variation in systems of conversational turn-taking (who speaks and when), the researchers analyze the association of various contextual, verbal, and non-verbal factors with mean response time. Despite some variation in response time between languages, each of the explanatory variables is found to have significant impact on response time independent of language. A further test on subjective perception of ideal response time suggests that although similar factors act on response patterns cross-culturally (in support of a 'universal systems' theory), speakers are hypersensitive to even minor cultural variations in response time.

The author claims that variance in sociocultural variables can be mostly be attributed to associations that are not cross-cultural. Although some patterns are universal, many social patterns occur on a regional, rather than worldwide, scale. This study presents a factor analysis of sociocultural variables that supports these claims.

Using a sample of 80 Austronesian societies from the Ethnographic Atlas, the study applies phylogenetic comparative methods to explore the transmission of cultural traits. The authors follow the research question: "for each possible cultural trait in each society, does the geographical (GNN) or phylogenetic nearest neighbor (PNN) best predict the state of the cultural trait?". Cultural traits in the realms of social organization, kinship, marriage, and subsistence were examined. The results show that PNN predicted slightly more traits in comparison to GNN, but there was not much variation between the different economic and social traits. In addition, 43-48% of traits were not predicted by GNN or PNN.