Music and Dance

Ask music4dance: Why are the tempos that music4dance lists for Salsa wrong?

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I’ve addressed questions about tempo in several different ways over the years, and I appreciate the continued feedback, as there is absolutely room for improvement in how the music4dance system handles tempo.

Algorithms are far from perfect:

The issue at hand is that many of the tempos listed for Salsa were exactly half the speed at which one would dance. There is a straightforward explanation for this. Many of the tempos listed on the site are algorithmically generated. The algorithms are decent at this point for many types of music. But with some music (and Salsa definitely falls into this category), the algorithm “hears” a double-time or half-time beat and chooses that over the “correct” tempo for the dance.

I have several mitigations for what I think of as “shadow” tempos that I’ve implemented over the years, including a new one that was prompted by the email that also convinced me to write another post on this subject.

First, the system prefers a user-entered tempo over any algorithmically generated tempo, even if the latter is more recent (the general default for conflicting information is to believe the most recent edit). I currently don’t open up editing tempos to every user, but contact me with an example of something you’d like to change for a quick check that we’re on the same page, and I’d be happy to add that permission to your account. The more people we have catching and correcting these issues, the more reliable the site will be overall.

Second, I occasionally do a pass through the database and adjust the tempo values that are obviously outside a dance’s tempo range if halving or doubling them would put them within the dance’s range. I recently ran this process for Salsa, which significantly reduced the number of songs with the issue that prompted the original complaint. I have considered generalizing this algorithm so that if a song is added without specifying a tempo and the system generates a tempo algorithmically, it would make a simple adjustment to double or halve the tempo if that puts it within the dance’s range. But I haven’t pulled the trigger on that yet. In any case, this process still left a few songs tagged as Salsa with very unsalsa-like slow tempos. I’ll dig into that shortly.

The last feature that I hope mitigates this algorithmically generated tempo issue is brand new. People need to understand that a tempo is algorithmically generated and should therefore be taken with a grain of salt1. But there was no easy way in the music4dance user experience to indicate that the system had generated a tempo algorithmically. Now, near each algorithmically generated tempo listing is a small icon of a computer chip; clicking that icon takes you to our help page with information on how tempos are generated.

Image of the song library with algorithmic tempo icons

Different dancers can hear different beats:

But there is another, related issue. It’s not just algorithms that can “hear” a double or half-time beat. Dancers can do the same thing2. The algorithm hearing a half-time beat mentioned above is precisely the opposite problem from the one I discussed in this post, where the tempo was twice what one would dance Bolero/International Rumba to. But it was for a similar reason. Some songs have a strong enough double-time or half-time beat that it’s hard to tell which is the primary beat to count or dance to. When you are actually on the dance floor, this generally doesn’t matter, since if you’re at a salsa club and the choice is between dancing to 190BPM and 95PM, you’ll dance at 190BPM. Or conversely, if you’re in a dance studio where you’ve been studying American Rhythm, and have the same choice, you might choose to dance Bolero at 95BPM (or maybe  Mambo at 190BPM, depending on the feel of the song).

So the remaining songs in the music4dance Salsa catalog that are listed as much slower than one would dance a salsa remain because someone set that tempo based on a different dance where the slower tempo is appropriate (or because they were added with an algorithmic tempo since the last time I did a pass to clean them up). There is no easy way to solve this problem when each song has only one tempo. But I’ve been refactoring the code and the indexing service to make it easier to carry more information about the intersection between dance and song, which would allow us to list a different Salsa tempo than a Cha Cha tempo for the same song. The problem is that we would have to save a tempo field for every song/dance combination, even in the most common case where all dances to a given song are at the same tempo. I need to do some more testing to make sure that doesn’t degrade the overall search experience. The more I hear from you that this limitation is frustrating, the higher it will rise on my to-do list.

As always, please let me know if you have any thoughts about the subject of this post or the site by commenting below or using other feedback mechanisms listed here. And if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way makes sense for you.

Footnotes

  1. This strikes me as ironic, since I vibe-coded this feature using GitHub Copilot and Claude. And even though the underlying algorithmically generated tempo issue existed long before the current generative AI situation, it has a similar feel to me. ↩︎
  2. It’s also really fun to be able to dance a different dance than the rest of the room if you can make it work, but that may just be my rebel nature. ↩︎

What Happens When a Song is Danced at Different Tempos?

Sometimes, a song can be a perfectly good Bolero when heard one way but a Salsa when counting the music differently. Another example is Slow Dance (Castle Foxtrot) vs. Lindy Hop. Generally, this phenomenon is because, with some music, it’s easy to count what the musicians see as either a half note or a quarter…

msc4dnc's avatar by msc4dnc

Ask music4dance: Why is the tempo range you list for West Coast Swing wrong?

A West Coast Swing DJ contacted me and kindly let me know that the tempo range I had listed for West Coast Swing was “entirely wrong.” The average tempos that she plays are between 90 and 110 bpm, while I listed a tempo range of 112-128 bpm.  Before I dig further into the details, I’d…

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About music4dance

Add to a Spotify Playlist Directly from music4dance

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A number of people have told me over the years that they create custom Spotify playlists by browsing the music4dance catalog and selecting individual songs. I’ve had ambitions to do all kinds of things to create and manipulate playlists. But it occurred to me, based on a recent conversation, that just the ability to easily add a song you’ve discovered in music4dance to an existing playlist could go a long way towards smoothing out that workflow.

And I thought that would be a relatively easy feature to implement, given that I’ve already built the infrastructure to create a playlist. So I knocked out what I believe is a minimal viable implementation of that feature. It’s live and ready to go, so please give it a try. The documentation is here – but just look for the “add to playlist” button on song pages or in the play menu in search results, and hopefully it’s easy to use from there.

Like the other Spotify playlist feature, it’s a premium feature. If this is the feature that would entice you to purchase a premium subscription, but you want to take it for a test drive, let me know, and I’ll promote your account to premium for a week1.

I haven’t looked recently, but last I checked, it may be possible to do something similar with Apple Music. It would be a pretty heavy lift, though, so I’d need some assurance that a significant number of people would be willing to pay for it. Reach out if you’re interested (not necessarily to pay for it right now, but to say you’d use it in the future if I wrote it).

As always, let me know if you have any thoughts about the subject of this post or the site by commenting below or using other feedback mechanisms listed here. And if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way makes sense for you.

Footnotes

  1. I haven’t gone to the trouble of making a trial subscription automatic, so please allow me some turnaround time to manually update your account – if I get enough requests, I’ll code it up. ↩︎

Create a Spotify Playlist

One of my initial goals with music4dance was to be able to create playlists to dance to.  I can finally say that I’ve got this working in a way that is close to my original vision at least for Spotify. The idea is, for instance, that I’d like to build a playlist of Foxtrot songs…

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New Feature: More Spotify Exports

One of the more active members of the music4dance.net community filed a bug report recently, noting that he tried to create a Spotify Playlist, but it came up empty. The playlist was All West Coast Swing (with at least 3 votes) songs having tempo between 100 and 120 beats per minute including songs edited by…

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New Feature: Searching for a song from Spotify or iTunes

A new member of the music4dance community, Arne, pointed out that he expected to be able to search by Spotify Id. Furthermore, he figured out how to do that by going to the Add Song by Id and dragging the song from Spotify into the edit field on that page. This is a case of programmer myopia on…

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Special Occasions

Holiday Music for Ballroom and Partner Dancing 2025

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Christmas and other holiday dances are just around the corner, so it’s time to take another look at music ideas to dance to. As of this writing, we have 2134 songs cataloged, up from 1759 songs last year and close to doubling the “nearly two hundred” holiday songs I saw when I added the first version of this feature in the twenty-seventeen! Thanks again to everyone who has contributed by adding songs and tagging songs with dances.

Last year, I asked for ideas about how to improve the catalog and listed a few thoughts of my own. I didn’t get any feedback, but I did implement one of my own thoughts as part of a larger project. The main holiday music page now shows songs with the largest aggregate number of dance votes first. I’ll refresh my call for thoughts on improving the catalog itself, but I won’t add any more of my own ideas. Please let me know if you have any thoughts. Even a quick email or comment on this post about how you use the catalog could be the source of the next feature.

That said, this year I’d like to focus a little more on building the catalog. On top of the normal methods of ingesting playlists that I find and the community adding and voting on holiday songs, I’d like to put out a call to band leaders,  producers (and any other role) who record music for partner dancing of any kind. Glenn Crytzer and I worked together to get his full catalog indexed on the site, and I also pulled in his list of holiday songs so they’re tagged appropriately. If you would like to work with me to index your music on the site, I’d be delighted to do that. I’m specifically calling for holiday albums today. Nevertheless, I’m happy to work with complete catalogs, even if they don’t include holiday music (I might prioritize that work a little lower for the next few weeks).

As always, let me know if you have any thoughts about the subject of this post or the site by commenting below or using other feedback mechanisms listed here. And if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way makes sense for you.

Happy Holidays, everyone. May your holiday dances be the best yet!

Holiday Music for Ballroom and Partner Dancing 2024

Christmas and other holiday dances are just around the corner, so it’s time to take another look at music ideas to dance to. As of this writing, we have 1759 songs cataloged, up from 1536 songs last year and close to doubling the “nearly two hundred” holiday songs I saw when I added the first version of…

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Please help us catalog new music

A Swing Band leader (Glenn Crytzer) reached out to me recently, asking if it would be possible to add his entire catalog to the music4dance.net database. He found a few of his songs already listed, but has a published catalog of well over a hundred songs, most of which should be danceable to partner dances…

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Holiday Music for Partner Dancing

It is that time of year when dancers are looking for holiday music for dancing.  That seems like a pretty good thing to be able to search for on the music4dance site.  So I thought I’d give it try.  The easy thing to do would be to just type Holiday into the search bar in…

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About music4dance

music4dance Goes Country (part I)

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One of the most common requests I’ve received is to support Country Western dances. That request has come in many forms, but I don’t have personal experience with Country Western dancing (well, that’s not 100% true, I learned to West Coast Swing at a Country bar in downtown Seattle that my ballroom dancer friends would hang out at after rehearsing). I’m nearly certain that in adapting music4dance to support more country music, I’ll stick my foot in something stinky and get some negative feedback. I’m all right with that – all feedback will make the site better in the long run, just please try to be gentle 🙂 I’ve also stepped on plenty of toes with Ballroom dance which I know quite a bit about, Argentine Tango, which I know a little about and some of the social dances that fall in between on my personal knowledge spectrum.

And music4dance is pretty complicated to begin with, so adding another dimension may make it harder to use. But I’m hoping that, with your help and some iteration on the idea, we can get things to work even better in the long run.

My initial approach to adding Country Western Dance support is to review the organizations that publish competition rules, including tempo information, and see if I can work those dances into the music4dance system in a way similar to how I’ve set up the competition ballroom dances. This turned out to be easier than I expected. All three organizations that I found online (United Country Western Dance Council, World Country Dance Federation, and American Country Dance Association) list eight competition dances. Triple Two, Polka, Night Club Two Step, Cha Cha, Waltz, Two Step, Swing, and West Coast Swing. Only one of those dances wasn’t already in the database (Triple Two). Polka and Country Two Step were random additions early in the site’s evolution because a couple of DJ friends and lists published by ballroom dance studios included enough songs of those styles to make it worth my while to include them.

My biggest question was, should I create new dances for all of the dances that overlapped? After all, the Cha Cha danced in Country Western competitions is certainly not the Cha Cha I learned competing in American Rhythm (heck, the cha cha that the International Latin dancers were learning in the next room wasn’t the same dance either). I decided to follow the pattern that I’ve already established for Ballroom dances with the same name, even if they are pretty different. Rumba is probably the strongest example in the ballroom catalog of two dances with the same name that are not the same dance. But the characteristics of the music that a dancer cares most about are similar – this is true even of Rumba, where the tempo is significantly different.

Not coincidentally, I recently finished a significant project that allowed me to use the core database to easily and accurately search specifically for American Rumba vs. International Rumba. While there are a few drawbacks to grouping America, International, and Country Cha Cha together, there are a lot of advantages both in terms of how the system works internally and in making it easier to find new music for everyone (I’ve always been a proponent of genre-bending in fiction and cross-over choreography in dance).

So, there is now an active “Country Western Competition Dancing” page, and all of the individual dance pages for dances that include Country styles include the competition info for those dances. I’ll continue to tweak some of this information as I get feedback and do more research.

I realized as I was writing this post that I hadn’t addressed the fact that this change also complicated the voting mechanism. I want to encourage folks to vote on a song being a good Cha Cha, but also make it easy for them to specify Country, International, or American. I made some quick tweaks, but this is definitely a feature still under development.

Please let me know what you think (even – possibly especially – if you think I got it completely wrong). I’m interested in whether there are other Country Western dances that I should include, even if they’re not part of the core competition dances. There was a reference to Country Smooth and Country Rhythm rounds in one of the organizations rules, should I be supporting that? I’ve also used the composite tempos from the rules, combining the different levels to give the broadest range. Should I just be using the most advanced category?  What else have I missed?

And as always, if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way makes sense for you.

Special Occasions

Songs for Halloween Ballroom and Partner Dances – 2025 edition

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We continue to add to the music4dance Halloween song catalog. As of this writing, there are 1151 songs tagged as Halloween with a positive number of dance votes.

As I’ve noted in previous posts, we’ve gone from using the general tagging mechanism where you could search on songs that had a musical genre of “Halloween” and a particular dance, to having a dedicated Halloween Songs page. Other than pulling some new lists of Halloween songs, there isn’t a lot new to highlight in this post. But I think it’s always worthy of a reminder when a dance-worthy holiday is approaching. I also don’t have a great way other than these posts to track the number of songs in these kinds of queries year over year (although that’s technically possible – probably not the most productive use of my coding time). Hopefully, the state of the Halloween and Holiday catalogs is mature enough to be generally helpful.

While I’ve got you, though, here are a few questions. Please feel free to reach out via the comment on this post or any of the other feedback mechanisms with your answers. I read all responses and respond to everything that I can.

First, the obvious: is there anything about searching for Halloween music that you would like to see improved? Most of the new features over the last few years have come out of conversations with members of the community. And on a tangentially related note, are there other holidays or more complex queries that you’d like to see represented on the site?

Next, if you have Halloween playlists you’re willing to share, please do. I can reasonably easily pull in lists of various formats. My main requirement is that the songs be well-defined (title, artist, album, if possible) and that they be associated with a form of partner dance. Or take a run at adding a few of your favorite songs or voting on your favorite dance styles for songs that are already in the catalog. If you’re up for a bit more of a project, I’m still offering free premium memberships for folks who have the knowledge and are willing to vote on the danceability of songs, especially those that don’t have any votes at all. There are about 500 Halloween songs currently in the catalog that don’t have any dance votes. 

Finally, as always, please let me know if you have any thoughts about the subject of this post or the site by commenting below or using other feedback mechanisms listed here. And if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way makes sense for you.

About music4dance

Please help us catalog new music

A Swing Band leader (Glenn Crytzer) reached out to me recently, asking if it would be possible to add his entire catalog to the music4dance.net database. He found a few of his songs already listed, but has a published catalog of well over a hundred songs, most of which should be danceable to partner dances…

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Special Occasions

Halloween Ballroom Music 2024

Halloween is fast approaching, and I’m updating the music4dance Halloween catalog to include more partner dance Halloween music. I’ve pulled some generic Halloween playlists and cross-referenced them with the existing music4dance catalog. Using this method and some help from the community, we now have 340 songs available in the Halloween catalog that are also tagged…

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Special Occasions

Are you ready for your Halloween Dance?

Whether you’re a DJ getting your playlist together or a performer looking for that perfect song to craft a routine to, our Halloween collection is a great place to start. I’ve recently spent some time expanding the catalog. As of this writing, there are 222 songs tagged as Halloween with at least one vote for…

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Special Occasions

Are you looking for Halloween Music to dance to?

Halloween is almost here and yet again I am late setting up something for Halloween related playlists.  In past years, I’ve just let this go since it feels like it’s too late to get something together when I start thinking about it in mid-October.  But this year I decided to just do it. After all,…

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Searching for Music

What if I want to find just Cha Chas tagged as American Style?

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Or one of the many variations, such as Slow Foxtrots labeled as “Traditional,” or Boleros labeled as “fast”?

Queries like the above have always been possible, but with a very major caveat. Up until now, you could search on Cha Cha dance and “American” style. But what that did was find all songs that had a net Cha Cha vote of at least one and a tag on any dance of “American” style. So if someone voted on a song as Rumba and tagged the Rumba as American, then someone else voted for the song as Cha Cha, searching on Cha Cha and American would include that song.

This behavior was particularly troublesome if you wanted to do something like search for fast Salsas, because you’d end up with songs that are fast Rumbas or Cha Chas, but slow Salsas, which is precisely what you don’t want. Side note: the workaround for that particular issue is to search on specific tempos, but that isn’t really the same as searching for songs that someone explicitly tagged as slow or fast for a particular dance, since there is more thought put into tagging (and not every song has a tempo associated with it).

I’ve done a bunch of restructuring and added more than a bit of UI to enable the kinds of searches that I’m describing here. I’m currently busy updating the documentation to catch up, but I hope that the fundamental change is relatively intuitive.

There have always been two kinds of tags: tags on songs and tags on top of a dance style for a song. I’m gravitating to calling the latter dance-specific tags, although I haven’t been 100% consistent yet. If you go to any of the dance details pages (try Slow Waltz), you’ll see two tag clouds now, labeled Dance Tags and Song Tags. Clicking on any of the tags in the Dance (specific) Tags section will give you the option to list the songs with that tag on Rumba.

Alternatively, you can navigate to the Advanced Search page, add Rumba to the list of dances, toggle the “Show Dance Details” switch, and select the option to include the American tag. In either case, you’ll end up with this result. Or we can answer the original question of All Cha Cha songs tagged as “American” style.

In any case, this is a very large new feature that includes a breaking schema change in the search index, so there are bound to be bugs. Please poke at it and let me know what you think. I’m doing my best to enable the deep scenarios that you ask for without overly complicating the core scenarios. Part of what I’m trying to do is what I alluded to in my last post, where I made a reference to making it easier to add refinements to dance searches, so that you can more accurately find all American Style Slow Foxtrots – once could theoretically do something similar with Country Cha Chas (which aren’t currently supported at all).

Please let me know if you have any thoughts about the subject of this post or the site by commenting below or using other feedback mechanisms listed here. And if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way makes sense for you.

New Feature: Searching on songs with a minimum number of dance votes

Several folks have been frustrated with the number of songs in the music4dance catalog that only have one or two votes for a particular dance style. This limitation doesn’t matter for many searches because you can sort by dance votes, and the most popular songs end up at the top. But if you want to…

msc4dnc's avatar by msc4dnc

New Dance: Single Swing

I’ve added Single Swing as a dance style that can be searched on and voted for in the music4dance catalog. While I think of this dance as a short-cut to use when I want to dance East Coast Swing to faster Jive or Lindy-Hop music, I’ve received enough feedback from the community that it’s considered a unique dance in its own right that…

msc4dnc's avatar by msc4dnc

“Search like Google” is now the default

Update (July 2024): This underlying search mechanism described in this series of posts is still in place and functions as described here, but the user interface has changed. Please see the Simple Search and Advanced Search documentation for how the current user interface works. I’ve just updated the music4dance site to make the new search engine the…

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About music4dance

Defining dance is hard. On further consideration language is hard, full stop.

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I’ve been building music4dance for well over a decade now, and I am still amazed at how passionate people can be about what is right or wrong, not just with respect to dance, but also with many other aspects of the site. Two such instances came up in a recent piece of feedback that I’d like to address, as they are related to ambiguities in language.

Dance

The first is that the site is oriented to a particular local community and is “completely useless” for dancers from other locales. I’ve never heard that specific feedback before. But I do read it as a variation on other feedback that amounts to how I’ve organized the site doesn’t line up with how everyone thinks about dance. I believe that is a good thing. Dance is diverse. A single individual shouldn’t be able to wrap their head around the whole breadth of the dance world, or even something slightly less broad like the partner dance world. Here are some previous posts where I’ve explored this idea in more depth:

I have lived in the Pacific Northwest for most of my adult life and learned to dance here. And while I’ve spent some time social dancing over the years, my primary focus was on competitive ballroom dancing. Indeed, with social dancing, there will be some bias towards what I know, and that is the scene in the area where I dance. With ballroom, not so much, as there are standards and organizations.

But the bottom line is that the more the community gets involved, the less the site will reflect my editorial viewpoint. My focus is on making it easier for anyone with an account to add songs and tag them with dances, which will shift the “editorial center” of the site slightly closer to their viewpoint. Some design limitations make it more difficult than I’d like to add new dance styles. But I’ve been rearchitecting the site to make that easier, so if dance styles are missing from the site that you would like to see represented, please get in touch with me. I’ll be happy to work with you to add them.  I am also working on a feature that I hope will make it easier to filter on variations of dances – more on that in a future post.

Donate

Another aspect of the site that has bugged me for some time, but that I haven’t addressed, is the use of the word “Donate” on the site. I’ve never received any feedback on this subject before now. However, I understand that using the word ‘donate’ can imply that the money spent would be a tax-deductible donation. That is not my intent, as I would use the phrase “charitable donation” and include a tax ID if it were. If someone could give me a better word than donate, I’d be happy to update the site with it. The only other contender I have come up with is “give,” but that has pretty much the same issue. I have not registered music4dance as a non-profit in any jurisdiction. For more details, please visit the subscription page.

The other word that this person objected to was “contribute.” My intention in using that word was to encompass different ways that someone could help improve the site. That does include monetary contributions in the form of subscriptions or (non-tax-deductible) donations. But it also covers voting on dances, adding songs, sharing the site with friends, and any of the other ways I’ve listed on the contribute page. I’m less concerned about the ambiguity of that term. But apparently at least one other person is, so I’d be happy to change that as well if someone has a better term.

While we’re on the subject of contributions, I want to take the time to thank everyone who has financially contributed to the site, including the person who provided the feedback that inspired this post. Ad and referral revenue only covers about 10% of my core operating costs; your (non-tax-deductible) subscriptions cover more than that. So thank you!

Please let me know if you have any thoughts about the subject of this post or the site by commenting below or using other feedback mechanisms listed here. I’ve still got a ways to go to get to the goal of covering the core operating costs of music4dance that I set in 2019 when I first turned on the subscription feature, so if you’re not already subscribing and would like to continue to enjoy the site and the blog, please consider contributing (in a non-tax-deductible sense).

About music4dance

Please help us catalog new music

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A Swing Band leader (Glenn Crytzer) reached out to me recently, asking if it would be possible to add his entire catalog to the music4dance.net database. He found a few of his songs already listed, but has a published catalog of well over a hundred songs, most of which should be danceable to partner dances (mostly Swing variations).

Glenn graciously provided me with a spreadsheet of his music, and I was able to upload it to music4dance. This was particularly nice because I could include his data on tempo and genre tags, as well as some other miscellaneous metadata from his comments that I turned into tags. But that led me to the next issue – his data didn’t include anything about which dance or dances would be particularly suitable for each of the songs. Which is entirely reasonable, he’s not actually dancing to them, and most of them would work for a generic swing night – the dancers can choose to dance Lindy, Balboa, East Coast, or something else to any particular song. Although that’s a vast over-simplification, if you’re interested in how a musician thinks about these things, Glenn’s article On Programming an Original Swing Music Album is an illuminating read.

That leaves me in a bit of a bind. I can certainly go through the 100+ songs myself and vote on which dances work for those songs, and I probably will. But I dance East and West Coast Swing and a bit of Lindy and Charleston – oh, and a bit of Slow Foxtrot, as Foxtrot and Swing music overlap – so I’m not familiar enough with some of the other dances to say whether a song would be suitable for Balboa, Jump Swing, Quickstep, etc. And more importantly, even with the dances I do know well, I’m only one opinion. Music4dance works much better when others in the community contribute by voting on dances that they are familiar with for songs in the catalog.

That line of reasoning led me down the path that I’ve considered several times before, of unlocking premium membership for free for members who vote on dances. I’ve thought and rejected several complex mechanisms to enable this. While some of them seem plausible, I don’t want to spend time writing code until I prove that there are enough members of the music4dance community willing to participate to make it worth my while.

Something about the interaction with Glenn and the thought that I’d love to get his songs showing up with associated dances sooner rather than later made me look at the problem a little differently. What if I went the low-tech/high-trust method of giving out premium memberships to anyone who committed to voting on a certain number of songs per month? I wouldn’t have to write any code at all for that, and if enough people take me up on it to make manual management of the “feature” cumbersome, I can always write the code later. That will also let me play with the parameters without building a whole dashboard of knobs and dials.

The Offer:

If you are familiar enough with at least one dance to confidently listen to an arbitrary song and say, “I would dance that dance to the song,” and are willing to spend some time each month doing that on the music4dance website, I’ll extend you a premium membership for each month that you do. Furthermore, I’ll take your word for it and give you the premium membership ahead of time. That will let you look at songs that no one has voted on yet (which is essential for things like the Glenn Crytzer catalog – at least until someone has voted on a song). To make this somewhat measurable on my end, let’s set the number of votes at 50 per month to keep your premium membership going. I’ll reserve the right to change the parameters at any time, including cancelling the program, since this is an experiment. But at minimum, if you contact me to try this out, you’ll get the first month of premium free, and I won’t turn that off before the end of the first month unless I detect you doing something malicious.

Why should you care about a premium account? In this case, it allows you access to more songs, including songs that no one has voted on yet and songs that I’ve pulled in from someone’s list of danceable songs but haven’t matched to a music catalog. With a premium account, ad content is turned off, and you can export results of your searches to Spotify – see details here.

Musicians (a quick aside):

Before I get into the nitty-gritty details of how to take me up on this offer, let me take a moment to reach out to other musicians who would perform music suitable for partner dancers. If you are interested in having me bulk upload your catalog to music4dance, please contact me, and I’d be happy to do that.

Here’s how to go about taking me up on my offer:

  • Create an account on music4dance.net here if you don’t have one already. (Account management help)
  • Email me at info@music4dance.net from the email you used to create your music4dance account and include “I’d like to Help Cataloging Music” in the title. Feel free to include any other details you’d like to share or questions about the offer in the email. I read everything that I get.
  • I expect to be able to upgrade your account and respond to your email within forty-eight hours (but this is an intention, not a commitment – read the notes above about this being an experiment) – if you haven’t heard from me in that timeframe, please try again.
  • Read the information about Dance Tags to understand how to vote.
  • Start voting!

This offer is for voting on dances, not for clicking the like button on songs. The latter is a feature that helps you organize your use of the music4dance catalog, but doesn’t do much for other users, so I’d like to focus on the core music-to-dance relationship of the voting mechanism for this offer.

Useful links:

What if you want to support music4dance but don’t have either the time or the experience to catalog songs by dance? There are plenty of other ways to contribute, as described on our “Contribute” page.

About music4dance

Open Source music4dance

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I’ve been considering publishing the music4dance source code as open source for some time now. I finally pulled the trigger!

You can find the source code for music4dance on GitHub, located at music4dance / music4dance; I’ve published the code under the MIT License. Note that this covers the code; I haven’t published the database.

I’ve documented the new ways (and some pre-existing ways) of contributing to music4dance in the contribution guide, and you can get an idea of what I (hopefully soon we) are working on by looking at the issues database. If you’re not a programmer, you can probably stop reading now. But, before you go, I would like to remind you that if you use music4dance there are plenty of ways to contribute to music4dance, including voting on which dance you would dance to a song or upgrading to a paid subscription.

Why Open Source?

My primary motivation for considering open source is that several people have reached out to me over the years, offering to help in general or implement a specific feature that they’re particularly interested in seeing. Making the project Open Source would be much easier than giving them access to a closed-source project.

I’ve also spent the last few years leading college students in contributing to other open-source projects as their capstone projects. While I’m not necessarily going to put music4dance features up for student projects, that experience combined with my contributions to BootstrapVueNext (the front-end framework I use for music4dance) has given me enough background in open-source projects to be more comfortable opening up my own codebase.

Another benefit of creating a GitHub project for music4dance is that I automatically get a reasonably well-designed issues database to manage code bugs, data bugs, and features that is visible to everyone. While you need a GitHub account to add issues, you don’t need an account to view them and get some idea of where I’m going with music4dance. Once more people start entering bugs, you’ll be able to see if others have run into the same issue you’ve discovered.

To top off my list of reasons to move to open source, I’ve been using some of the problems I’ve worked on with music4dance as fodder for technical articles on Medium. Since the source code for music4dance wasn’t publicly available, I built small projects to demonstrate the issues. While having small, isolated projects to demonstrate technical issues is useful – in at least one case, I’m maintaining the sample project as a means of testing updates to the affected systems in isolation – I’d also like to be able to show the solutions in the context of the real-world project that inspired them. Now I can.

What took so long?

I’ve been working on music4dance for over fifteen years. Why haven’t I made this move earlier? One reason is that by the time it occurred to me to move to open source, the codebase was well over a decade old. Much of the code was dated, there were many things I’d rewrite given time, and test coverage was abysmal. My impulse was to clean things up before publishing. I even started doing so with some of the oldest code. But I concluded that it would take approximately forever to get the code into shape, especially if I spent some of my time on new features and contributing to the song database.

I didn’t initially create music4dance as an open-source project because I hoped it would be the seed of a profitable business. I’ve pulled back that expectation to the hope that I can generate enough revenue from referrals, ad revenues, and subscription fees to cover the server fees and other expenses, making this passion project a revenue-neutral proposition.

In conclusion: For better or worse, the code is now out in the wild. Please take a look and let me know your thoughts.

Please let me know if you have any thoughts about the subject of this post or the site by commenting below or using other feedback mechanisms listed here. And if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way makes sense for you.

Music and Dance

Nine Sinatra Songs – Ballroom inspired Ballet

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Pacific Northwest Ballet included Twila Tharp’s Nine Sinatra Songs as part of their Director’s Choice performance this year. I’m not in any way qualified to review a Ballet performance, but I can say that I thoroughly enjoyed it and had a great time playing with the Ballroom-inspired aspects of the dancing as I watched the show unfold. For me, the idea that the dancing was inspired by ballroom rather than in any way attempting to choreograph actual ballroom dance steps on ballet dancers is what made it work (this is the issue I sometimes have with partner dance in Broadway musicals). It was obvious in several of the nine pieces that  Ballroom dance inspired the piece, and the upper body shaping and movements felt quite ballroomesque throughout the performance.

On returning home, I hoped to find a resource that listed the dances that Tharp drew from for each of the first eight pieces (the ninth is a reprise group number), but I failed. The notes from some of the performances mention the roots of one or two dances, but it seems like, for the most part, they name the same couple of songs. So, my guess is that even a thorough search of those through the years wouldn’t yield a complete list. As an aside, it was fun to jump down the rabbit hole of the French Apache Dance that Tharp drew from for the choreography for That’s Life. If someone has such a reference, please let me know.

In the meantime, I will take this as inspiration to play a little with the possibilities of music and dance. Sinatra is already well represented in the music4dance catalog, with 166 songs listed before I started filling out the few missing entries from the ballet. But I’ve always thought of dancing Foxtrot to Sinatra or maybe Swing. In the ballet, Tango, Rumba, and Samba were definitely represented. So, I took a few minutes to see what the music4dance community has to say about dancing to this music.

If you go to the Frank Sinatra artist page, you’ll see Slow Foxtrot, Lindy Hop, Rumba, Castle Foxtrot, East Coast Swing, Jive, Quickstep, Peabody, West Coast Swing, Single Swing, Slow Waltz, Balboa, Bolero, Bossa Nova, Viennese Waltz, and Blues all represented.

And here’s a custom music4dance playlist that includes all eight songs (although one song is the Perry Como version since the Sinatra version isn’t available on Spotify or iTunes).

A snapshot of the eight songs used in "Nine Sinatra Songs"
The eight songs used in “Nine Sinatra Songs” as shown on music4dance.

Are there other partner dances that Tharp drew from in this work that we should represent in music4dance? Are there other Ballroom-inspired ballets out there worth viewing? Do they use different music that you’d like to add to the catalog? Are there other playlists that you’d like to overlay the music4dance information on, like I did with this one? If you have ideas about this post or the site, please comment below or use other feedback mechanisms listed here. And if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way makes sense for you.