ojibwe music #5

Another quotation from the 1902 Evening Post article on Ojibwe music. Once again, there's a reference to someone, no doubt Burton, investigating the Ojibwes' sense of music through an experimental process:

Such Ojibway music as the white visitor has heard divides easily into two general classes, lyric and ceremonial. The latter class subdivides into accompanied and unaccompanied songs. Inasmuch as the accompaniment consists always and only of drum beats, it might seem as if the subdivision were superfluous, but this is by no means the case. The unaccompanied songs are rhythmically free; that is, they may be in double or triple or indeterminate rhythm. The accompanied songs never fail to be in double rhythm. This may have all the gradations of tempo from andante to presto, but it is always double. The accompanied song, moreover, is always enhanced by dancing, and the plain double rhythm is the only one to which the Ojibway can direct his feet. It has been learned by patient experiment that any form of triple rhythm, or even 6-8, is hopeless confusion to the Ojibway mind, and a tangle to his limbs. This is rather perplexing in presence of the complicated rhythm of "My Bark Canoe" (described further on), in which 3-4 and 4-4 alternate, and the still more complex rhythm of some of their songs, one of which analyzes into the very unusual rhythmical structure of seven beats to the measure.

I wonder what the 'patient experiment' involved - playing tunes in 6-8 and shouting 'dance! dance!', perhaps?