While Halpern was first and foremost a musicologist, she did rely on her First Nations informants for cultural explanations and translations of what she recorded. She is also notable for dispelling the belief that many of the sounds in Native folk songs were meaningless "filler" sounds. Some were specific words, while others were more onomatopoeic, indicating, for example, sounds of pain and animal sounds, and others still were choreographic cues. By the early 1980s, Halpern had identified 29 style characteristics of the folk songs she studied.