Searching for Music

New Feature: Improved Text Searching

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I’ve always been a bit dissatisfied with how I set up the Artist field in music4dance.  A free text field for the artist generally works, but it doesn’t capture everything I’d like.  But since the core functionality of music4dance is to associate songs with dance styles, keeping the rest of the system simple is a sound decision, and I stand by it.

However, something comes up every few years that makes me want to at least incrementally improve the text search part of the system.  When Prince left us, I broke down and created artist pages based on the text of the artist field.  This was a significant improvement, and I returned to that when writing my DWTS Taylor Swift/Whitney Houston post.  In that post, I listed a few things that I thought could be improved with artist search and then let things rattle around in my brain for a few months.

Last week, I decided to spend a little while seeing what I could do to make a worthwhile improvement in a short time.  What came out was a pair of changes.  The more visible change is an addition to the advanced search page. 

I’ve added some additional controls to explicitly search each of the three primary text fields in the music4dance database – Title, Artist, and Albums.  This enables a more direct way to get to all of the songs by an artist.  It also allows the inverse.  While adding the artist page let you get to all of the songs by “Prince,” it didn’t let you find all of the songs with “Prince” in the Title without also seeing the Prince and Prince Royce songs or, for that matter, songs with Prince in album names.  That is, if you can find one song with Prince as the artist you can click on the link to get to the artist page.

One side effect of this change is that if you search for Prince in the artist field, you also get Prince Royce songs, although they end up at the end of the list.  While that’s not great in the case of Prince, you now have a fast way to get to a link that will send you to the Prince artist page, which does only list Prince songs.  The good part of this quirk is that if you’re looking for songs by Benny Goodman, you’ll get a list containing not just songs with exactly “Benny Goodman” in the artist field.  You also get songs by “Benny Goodman Sextet,” “Benny Goodman Quartet,” “Benny Goodman and Charlie Christian,” “Peggy Lee and Benny Goodman,” etc.

The other more subtle improvement is that I dug into how the underlying database ranks the results of a search.  With my new understanding, I decided to weight the Title and Artist fields considerably higher than the other fields, including the Albums fields.  This helps more than one would think because I grab as many albums as I can associate with a song, and there may be a word in several of those album titles that doesn’t show up in the title or artist. Since the database uses the frequency of a word in the text as part of the weighting, those songs will show up high in the ranking, while it’s not obvious why that song showed up at all since you have to click through to the song details page to see the album names.

Give it a whirl and tell me what you think.  I will probably still do an artist index and possibly figure out a way to do some cleaning up of the database.  There are still songs where the title contains a featured artist, and that artist isn’t represented in the artist field at all, for instance.

As always, I’m very interested in your feedback, so please share any thoughts and ideas about this post or the site by commenting below or using other feedback mechanisms listed here. In addition, if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way makes sense for you.

What are your favorite Prince songs for partner dancing?

I, like many, am mourning and listening to Prince’s music. Over and over again. Since I’ve been thinking a lot about music and partner dancing recently, this lead me to think about what I would dance to each song.  Especially when Leader of the Band popped up in my playlist and screamed Cha-Cha at me. …

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by msc4dnc

Ballroom Dancing to Whitney Houston and Taylor Swift

The recent Dancing With the Stars episodes featuring Whitney Houston and Taylor Swift’s music caused a significant spike in traffic at music4dance.net, with dancers looking for music by those artists. I find this exciting for many reasons.  There’s the obvious reason that more traffic means more people showing interest in this project.  It also reinforces…

Keep reading
by msc4dnc
Music and Dance

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

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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 like to take a moment to thank this DJ and everyone who has taken the time to point out issues with the site.  Curating a site like music4dance is a big job, and mistakes will creep in. So, having the community members speak up when they see something that seems wrong is essential to keeping the site as accurate as possible.

In this particular case, I found it surprising that the information I listed was entirely wrong.  I don’t claim to be an expert on all (or even most) of the dances I cover on the site.  But West Coast Swing is one of the dances I’m most comfortable actually dancing.  My first thought was that some kind of regional difference was going on.  But one of the DJs my interlocutor referred to plays at a venue I’ve danced at within the last decade.

My second thought was that this was a difference between the Ballroom community and the “Westie” community.  That’s a bit closer to the mark. But as mentioned, I have done some social WCS dancing in the same venues where the DJs write about playing much slower tempos than I’m used to, so it couldn’t be the whole story.

The only other thing I could think of was that dances evolve over time.  This is especially true with dances like WCS, which are danced to popular music that is also changing.  In fact, that’s one of the things that I enjoy about WCS.  As primarily a ballroom dancer, WCS is the dance that I can take out to a club and just get funky with.  So, I’m pretty sure the combination of these three things brings me to a reasonable explanation of the difference that prompted the original email.

Dances evolving over time is something that both intrigues me and confounds the part of my brain that wants to be able to neatly categorize things.  And the categorizing part of my brain is fairly dominant in building a site like music4dance.

One of the reasons that it even occurred to me that I could do this kind of categorization is that competition dances tend to “lock in” the tempo somewhat, at least for competitions where the DJs are required to play music within a specific range.  That is true of Ballroom competitions but apparently not true of West Coast Swing competitions. I’ve updated my WCS social tempo to 80-130bpm, the broadest tempo range suggested by DJ Koichi Tsunoda in his post. This is the most authoritative source I could find.  It doesn’t look like World Swing Dance Council or National Associate of Swinge Dance Events publishes requirements or recommendations for WCS tempo.

Contrary to my previous point, even Ballroom dance tempos evolve.  I discovered that the Ballroom Dance organizations (NDCA and DanceSport) updated their tempo recommendations for competition dances since the last time I looked.  But there wasn’t a lot of shift.  The most significant change was that NDCA went from a complicated matrix of tempos that included different recommendations for ProAm vs Professional/Amateur and level (Bronze, Silver, Gold) to a single tempo for each dance.  I’ve updated those tempos as well.  But there wasn’t any significant shift in direction – none of the tempo recommendations for dances were much faster or slower than previously.

I’m considering adding a “Social” style to the Americana and International styles that are dictated by the Ballroom associations.  It’s certainly true that even ballroom dances can be danced to a broader range of tempos than what is dictated by competition rules, and the site should reflect that.

All of this is to lead up to a couple of specific requests for anyone who has some expertise in these areas.

  1. Please let me know if you have an issue with any of the tempos I list on the site.  I depend on the community to help keep me up-to-date and catch any errors.  While there isn’t a “right” answer unless stated by competition rules, I’d like to do my best to land on numbers that are not “entirely wrong.”
  2. Specifically, if anyone has a good source for comfortable or social ranges of tempos for the ballroom dances, I’d like a place to start.

In addition to the above specific requests, if you have comments or suggestions or stumble upon other errors, please feel free to reply to this post or contact me here. And finally, if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way makes sense for you.

Translating how dance teachers count

Something came up the other day as I was talking to a friend who just took his first social dance class. He has a musical background and is used to hearing and counting beats as a musician. So he got a little obsessed and distracted with figuring out the translation between what he was hearing…

by msc4dnc

Do Dancers Think in Eights?

I was tickled to hear Nigel Lythgoe talk a little about choreographing tap on a recent episode of So You Think You Can Dance. The commentary is at about 1:13, but please start at about 1:10 so you can see the performance that he’s referring to.  It’s a tap piece that Emma, one of the…

by msc4dnc
Special Occasions

Ballroom Christmas Music (2023)

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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 partner dance to.  I haven’t made any major changes to the Holiday Dance Pages this year, but there is plenty of new music to browse.  Last year, we were at 667 songs, and I was hoping to break 1000 for this year.  Which we did.  As of this writing, music4dance has 1536 songs cataloged that are tagged as both Holiday and have some kind of partner dance associated with them.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this effort!

Hear the Beat, Feel the Music: James Joseph

This Holiday season, I am trying something new.  I’ve partnered with James Joseph to offer a special holiday promotion.  From now until the end of the year, if you support music4dance by subscribing at the Bronze ($25) level or donating $25, you’ll receive an electronic copy of Jim’s book Hear the Beat, Feal the Music .  This is a great resource for dancers working on improving their musicality (see my full review here), and I’m grateful to Jim for providing this opportunity for the music4dance community.

Click here to subscribe or donate.

If you aren’t in a position to provide financial support for this project, there are plenty of other ways to contribute.  Specifically, to help build the Holiday Music catalog, you can:

  • Browse our music catalog and tag songs as Holiday when you find them.
  • Add new music through the Add Song form.
  • If you have a list of holiday songs categorized by dance style that you are willing to share, please email me at info@music4dance.net or contact me through the feedback form.

As always, if you have comments or suggestions, please reply to this post or contact me here. Please consider helping with the music4dance project either by helping with the Holiday Music catalog mentioned above or any other ways listed on the “Contribute” page.

Searching for Music

Ballroom Dancing to Whitney Houston and Taylor Swift

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The recent Dancing With the Stars episodes featuring Whitney Houston and Taylor Swift‘s music caused a significant spike in traffic at music4dance.net, with dancers looking for music by those artists.

I find this exciting for many reasons.  There’s the obvious reason that more traffic means more people showing interest in this project.  It also reinforces the idea that dancing to music you enjoy is good, even if it’s not exactly the music that co-evolved with the dance.  This is one of the reasons I started music4dance in the first place and one of the reasons that I continue to spend time on the site. Another reason I’m excited is that even without doing a push, as of this writing, 58 Taylor Swift and 37 Whitney Houston songs are tagged with some kind of dance in the music4dance catalog.

It also made me realize that I haven’t checked in on how well the site handles searching by artist in years.

Here’s a quick overview of what the site currently provides.

  • Do a general search for an artist’s name either from the search control in the title bar or from the main song library page
  • This will result in a list of songs, many of which have the artist you searched for listed in the artist field.
  • At that point, clicking on the artist’s name will take you to a list of songs that we’ve cataloged by that artist.

This generally works1, and a significant number of people are landing on the Taylor Swift and Whitney Houston pages, so I have to count that as a success.

There are also some significant drawbacks that I can see and likely plenty that I can’t.  So, I will generate a quick list here for your perusal.  Please respond with feedback if you find any of these particularly onerous or if there are issues not on this list that you find more annoying.

  • There is no way to get to a list of artists cataloged on music4dance, so you have to do a general search for artists to get to a link that will take you to the artist page.
  • The artist field is a general text field, so typos and variations creep in2.
  • The artist page is pretty sparse; it’s just a list of songs that contain the artist’s name in the artist field. There are probably other things that we could include on the page.

What do you think? Are these your top issues with how I’m handling artists? Or are there other things that you find more pressing? Let me know, either way.

As always, I’m very interested in your feedback and read every comment and email. So please share any thoughts and ideas about this post or about the site by commenting below or using other feedback mechanisms listed here. In addition, if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way makes sense for you.

P.S. I’m working on getting out my annual holiday music post. Meanwhile, if you’re looking to put together a holiday playlist or searching for the perfect song for that holiday party exhibition piece, the posts from previous years should give you something to start with. Or you can just head to the holiday music page and see what you find.

Related Posts

What are your favorite Prince songs for partner dancing?

I, like many, am mourning and listening to Prince’s music. Over and over again. Since I’ve been thinking a lot about music and partner dancing recently, this lead me to think about what I would dance to each song.  Especially when Leader of the Band popped up in my playlist and screamed Cha-Cha at me. …

by msc4dnc

The Pink Martini Solution

Not all artists are created equal when it comes to creating dance-able music.  For instance, one of my favorite artists of all time is John Coltrane.  Do you see him well represented in the music4dance catalog?  Absolutely not.   Because a consistent tempo just isn’t a core part of his music.  Which is part of the…

by msc4dnc
  1. And – bonus – their names correctly autocomplete when you type them in the search box.  This seems like a simple thing that one would expect in any search box on any site, but it’s a pretty heavy lift to get working correctly. ↩︎
  2.  I intentionally de-emphasized the artist in my original site design.  The artist field is just a free text field that can contain anything.  That ends up being somewhat random, between what I’ve pulled from various sources and what users have entered.  In the case of Whitney Houston,  Hold Me is listed with Whitney Houston & Teddy Pendergrass as the artists.  This works all right since the Whitney Houston artist page is just a search for the keywords “Whitney Houston” in the artist field.  But in the case of Taylor Swift, there are several songs that are listed as “Feat. Taylor Swift” in the title and her name isn’t in the artist field at all.  So they wouldn’t show up on the Taylor Swift page.  The Joker and the Queen by Ed Sheeran is one example of this issue.  One fix to this is to do some cleaning up of the catalog and make sure that the featured artists show up in the artist field as well as (or instead of) the title field.  Another is to take a step back and build a more complex scheme, possibly leaning on something like musicbrainz.org to center more on artists. ↩︎
Music and Dance

Translating how dance teachers count

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Something came up the other day as I was talking to a friend who just took his first social dance class. He has a musical background and is used to hearing and counting beats as a musician. So he got a little obsessed and distracted with figuring out the translation between what he was hearing in the music and what he was hearing from the dance teacher. In this casual intro to partner dancing class at the local community college, he was learning Night Club Two Step, Salsa, and East Coast Swing.

We dance all of those styles to music in 4/4 time. So, as someone with musical training, my friend heard the beat as 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 1 - 2 - 3 - 4, etc. But that’s not how the dance teacher was counting. Let’s break these down dance by dance.

Night Club Two Step

Night Club Two Step is generally counted as Slow - Quick - Quick.  For most dances that I count this way or the slight variation Quick - Quick - Slow, the Slow is two beats, and the quicks are each a single beat. The translation is straightforward: In the first case, the quicks are on 1 and 2, and the slow is on 3. In the second, the Slow is stepped on 1, and the quicks are 3 and 4.

– or –

Each box represents a quarter note in 4/4 time.

Salsa

Salsa is even easier. If it’s counted using slows and quicks, it’s Quick - Quick - Slow. Translation: quicks on beats 1 and 2 and slow on 3, holding 4. But many salsa teachers count the phrase, which is a two-measure grouping in dance. When they do that, they generally count 1 - 2 - 3 - (pause) - 5 - 6 - 7 - (pause). That’s my preferred way since it aligns with the musical counting of the beats. Occasionally, I’ve heard a Salsa teacher count 1 - 2 - 3 - (pause) - 4 - 5 - 6 - (pause). That variation drives me up the wall. It completely breaks my musician/programmer’s brain because the second measure is counted with numbers that are off by one from what’s in my head. Fortunately, my friend wasn’t exposed to that variation. 

Each box represents a quarter note in 4/4 time.

East Coast Swing 

East Coast Swing is more complicated for a couple of reasons. 

First, it is generally counted as Tri-ple-step Tri-ple-step Rock Step. Or 1 & 2 - 3 & 4 - 5 - 6. We’re dancing a 6-count basic to 4/4 music, so each basic takes a measure and a half. This timing throws a monkey wrench into counting it like a musician. If you want to be a stickler, it would be something like 1 & 2 - 3 & 4 - 1 - 2, and then the following basic would be 3 & 4 - 1 & 2 - 3 - 4, but I’ve never even tried to do that while dancing. The second is that the triple steps are syncopated, so they don’t fall precisely on the eight notes. But this also maps directly to the music, so it shouldn’t be hard for anyone who has played a bit of Jazz to get their head wrapped around.

Each box represents an eighth note in 4/4 time

Conclusions

Every dance has its nuances. Mambo and International Rumba are counted Quick - Quick - Slow, but start on the 2, Waltzes are danced to 3/4, Samba has its own form of syncopation, etc.

Let me know if you find this kind of analysis helpful and would like this kind of analysis for other dances. I’m considering doing a version of this for each dance on the dance pages, including some prettier charts, if I get some feedback that this is useful. Also, I’d be delighted to hear about other ways you count when partner dancing.

As always, I’m very interested in your feedback, so please share any thoughts and ideas about this post or the site by commenting below or using other feedback mechanisms listed here. In addition, if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way makes sense for you.

Related Posts

Do Dancers Think in Eights?

I was tickled to hear Nigel Lythgoe talk a little about choreographing tap on a recent episode of So You Think You Can Dance. The commentary is at about 1:13, but please start at about 1:10 so you can see the performance that he’s referring to.  It’s a tap piece that Emma, one of the…

by msc4dnc

Book Review: Hear the Beat, Feel the Music

As anyone who has spent any time reading my blog or interacting with my website should know by now, I’m very passionate about music, dance and the relationship between the two.  I’m also very analytical about those subjects.  And, yes, I believe passion and analysis can co-exist, don’t you? The fatal flaw with my perspective…

by msc4dnc
Special Occasions

Are you ready for your Halloween Dance?

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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 some kind of partner dance like Foxtrot, Cha-Cha, or Salsa.

Several years ago, I made an initial pass at taking generic Halloween playlists and cross-referencing them with the music4dance catalog of songs tagged by dance style. At the time, I did the simplest possible thing: I imported the songs from some Halloween catalogs and then put a link in the songs menu that went to that query. At the time, 80 songs were tagged as Halloween and associated with a dance.

This seemed fine at the time, but recently, I noticed folks searching on the keyword “Halloween.” What does that get someone beyond the songs I had explicitly imported a while ago? One of the side-effects of the system is that I link as many albums that a song has been released on as I can. This means that if a song lands on “Halloween Hits” or something like it, searching by the Halloween keyword will find it even though no one in the music4dance universe tagged it as such.

So, over the last few days, I spent some time reviewing that list and adding an explicit “Halloween” tag where I felt it was appropriate. For the most part, if the song was included on a Halloween Party album, I included it. But I didn’t include songs that were merely on an album because they were used in a horror movie. Some songs will still appear in a search for Halloween that aren’t in the explicit Halloween catalog. If you find one that would make sense to include in a Halloween dance, please tag it.

As I mentioned earlier, between the general evolution of the music4dance catalog and my current efforts, there are, as of this writing, 222 songs that are tagged as Halloween and also have at least one dance vote.

That starts to get interesting and motivated me to generalize the code I wrote a while back for Christmas/Winter holiday music to create a dedicated Halloween page. That’s where you’ll land if you choose Music -> Halloween from the main menu. And that gives an easy route to finding all the Halloween songs to dance a Single Swing to (for instance). You could have done that with the old system, but folks don’t always find the advanced search; this makes things a little easier. In addition, this gave me a smooth path to exporting the results to Spotify. Now, each Halloween Dance page has a Spotify widget with the playlist, and you can go to the music4dance Spotify account and browse the Halloween Playlists. While you’re there, please like the playlist and the music4dance account, which helps spread the word.

As always, I’m very interested in your feedback, so please share any thoughts and ideas about this post or the site by commenting below or using other feedback mechanisms listed here. In addition, if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way makes sense for you.

About music4dance

Introducing the music4dance technical blog

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When I started the music4dance blog nearly a decade ago, I considered including a technical component by writing about the challenges of building and maintaining the site. A good friend talked me out of doing that, and I still think it’s the right decision. I’m assuming most of the audience for this blog isn’t particularly interested in what I’ve done to build the site. You’re interested in what you can do with the site, learning more about the relationship between music and partner dancing, and how to find music to dance to. If I’m wrong about you, please let me know; if I get more than a few direct responses, I’ll set up a poll and consider a pivot based on the results.

I am disappointed I never got around to spinning up a technical blog. I’ve learned much over the years while building and maintaining this site. And I generally feel the need to share when solving technical problems. Now that I’m not leading a team of engineers, I’ve given up my primary outlet. So, it finally tipped the balance, and I’ve started some technical writing.

I decided to use medium.com to host my technical writing. That removed the barrier to entry of setting up another site and spinning on what technology to use, and I’ve been happy with the platform. The first series of posts is only tangentially music4dance related but is still motivated by this project. I use a simplified version of the tempo counter applet from the website to compare the experience of writing that app on several multi-platform frameworks. In addition, I took the opportunity to write about my experience in helping build the foundation for Microsoft’s version of that solution. So, if you have a technical bent, please take a look – the first post is “Which Multi-platform framework should I use to write my app?” And if you like it, please do the things that help spread the word. With medium, those things are to clap, follow, and share the link with friends.

As always, I’m very interested in your feedback and read every comment and email. So please share any thoughts and ideas about this post or about the site by commenting below or using other feedback mechanisms listed here. In addition, if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way makes sense for you.

About music4dance

Post #100: Music4Dance Turns Ten

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My first blog post was in July 2014. I had early versions of the website up and running for about a year before starting the blog, so the site is just about ten years old.

It’s been an adventure building music4dance over the years. I’ve been thrilled when others have piped up and expressed opinions about how the site works. So for those of you that have done that, thanks! And for those that haven’t yet, feel free to get in touch. The more feedback I get, the better the site will become. 

My motivation for building and expanding music4dance has changed over the years. Initially, it was to retrain as a full-stack developer and take an (admittedly pretty weak) stab at seeing if this idea that had been floating in my head for years could become a business. I succeeded in the former, landing a job as a full-stack developer (or at least a hands-on manager of full-stack developers). Of course, the business never really turned profitable, as I’ve mentioned before.

Once I was working full time, I had to pull back on how much time I was spending on music4dance. I kept at it partly because this is a labor of love. But also because it gave me some coding time outside of work. And I could move the music4dance technology stack ahead of the codebase I was responsible for at work, which was incredibly useful at the time.

I’m sure there will be other transitions and focus changes over the years coming years.

The site itself has been through some significant reworks over that time. I moved the core database engine from Microsoft SQL Server to Azure Cognitive Search and changed the core client-side rendering from the asp.net framework with a sprinkling of knockout.js to vue.js backed by a thin layer of asp.net core.

This blog has gone through several iterations under the hood, but it’s been a pretty plain vanilla WordPress site for the whole time. The (mostly) invisible changes have been around how I have hosted the site, the most recent being that I gave up on self-hosting and now just run the site on WordPress.com. Over the last nine years, I’ve written 100 posts (this post is coincidently an approximate 10th anniversary and an exact 100th post). Some posts hold up pretty well, some could use a facelift, and a few are stale or just plain misleading. Given the vagaries of search engines, I dislike taking down posts. But it’s well past time to impose some order on the chaos, update some of the most outdated posts, and make it easier to find what you’re looking for in the mass of words.

So, I went through all the old posts and categorized them. I think I’ve managed a reasonable taxonomy of posts, although kind of like dance styles, not everything fits as neatly as I’d like:

About music4dance: Posts about the music4dance.net site features, excluding features specifically about searching for music.

Searching for Music: Posts that are about searching for songs, excluding those about special occasions

Special Occasions: Searching for music related to special occasions (Holidays, Weddings, etc.)

Music and Dance: Posts about music as it relates to dance and dance as it relates to music.

Reviews: Reviews of books, podcasts, websites, etc.

Archive: Posts that are no longer relevant

I also intend to go through and produce fresh versions of some essential content when it’s gone stale, like I did recently with the wedding music posts (part 1 & part 2).

As always, I’m very interested in your feedback and read every comment and email. So please share any thoughts and ideas about this post or about the site by commenting below or using other feedback mechanisms listed here. In addition, if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way makes sense for you.

P.S. As I started re-organizing the blog, I didn’t realize that an update as minor as adding a category would re-publish a post to my linked-in and Facebook feeds, so all of you who follow me on those platforms; sorry for the spam; I’ll try to do better in the future.

Special Occasions

We’d like to dance a “real” partner dance as the first dance at our wedding (Part II: We already chose our dance)

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Last time I wrote about how music4dance can help you find a dance to match the song you’d like to dance to for your first dance (or other wedding dances). This time, I’ll cover how the site can help you find a song if you already know what dance style you want to dance. Before I dig into that, I’d like to repeat that your local dance studio and your wedding DJ are both excellent sources of ideas.

Since I first wrote about this idea early a decade ago, I’ve made some improvements to the site. The easiest way to find wedding songs that match your dance is to go to the wedding music page (Music -> Wedding on the main menu). There you’ll find a table of dance styles and types of wedding dance. The cells in that table have a number that represents the number of songs we have cataloged for that dance style and also tagged with the type of wedding dance. Click on the number to get to a list of songs where you can play samples and find the full version of the song on Spotify, Apple Music, or Amazon.

The wedding music page is just a shortcut to using the advanced search tool. If you want to search for something unavailable in the wedding dance table, you can do the same type of search using the tool. For instance, I haven’t added Mother/Daughter songs to the table as of this writing. But a few people have tagged songs as Mother/Daughter. So you could go to the advanced search tool, include the tag “Mother Daughter,” optionally choose a dance, and see what comes up.

In addition, when you do an advanced search, you can find the search again on your search page. And if you’re a premium subscriber, you can export results as a Spotify playlist to listen through the songs at your convenience.

I hope this helped. And if you’ve got suggestions for other wedding-related tags, please consider becoming part of the music4dance community and adding your wedding songs to the catalog with whatever tags make sense to you – they’ll be helpful to someone else in the future.

As always, I’m very interested in your feedback, so please share any thoughts and ideas about this post or the site by commenting below or using other feedback mechanisms listed here. In addition, if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way makes sense for you.

Special Occasions

We’d like to dance a “real” partner dance as the first dance at our wedding (Part I: We already chose our song)

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Wedding season is upon us, and one of the things that come with weddings is receptions with first dances, father/daughter dances, mother/son dances, mother/daughter dances, and any other variation you can think of. I think it’s extra special when those dances are recognizably partner dances like Foxtrot, Rumba, or Swing. Of course, I have a bit of a bias.

If you want to find a dance that fits the song you love, here are some things that can help. In my next post, I’ll cover the other direction – finding a song to fit your dance.

First, consider visiting your local dance studio and asking a professional. The other professional that could help is your wedding DJ; sometimes, they are also dance teachers or at least know a dance teacher to connect you with.

In tandem with going to a professional, some features of music4dance.net can help. The first is to try searching for your song – you can type the title into the search box in the menu bar or on the Song Library page. If it’s a particularly popular song, you might also include the artist to see if you can get to the specific version of the song. But oftentimes, variations on a song by different artists still maintain enough of the same characteristics to be danced to the same dance. So be creative in your search and see what you come up with.

For example, try typing “Fly me to the moon” into the search bar – including the quotes to get songs with that full title rather than all the songs with those keywords. And we’re probably most interested in the Frank Sinatra version, so scroll down to that or add Sinatra (outside of the quotes) to the search.

You can already see which dances folks in the music4dance community have voted on to dance to this song. There is quite a spectrum. If you click on the song title, you will get more details. Among other things that will show you that Slow Foxtrot is the most-voted dance for this song, some folks have voted for East Coast Swing and Jive but have noted that it’s slow for those dances. That’s not necessarily bad; you could speed up the song a bit (modern technology is fantastic) and get it to something still slow for ECS but not crazy slow – which might be just the right tempo for a first dance.

But what if you can’t find the song in the music4dance catalog? There is another tool that can provide some help. Try looking at the tempo counter tool (and its help page). Counting out the song’s tempo in this tool will show you which dances can technically be danced to the song. The tempo counter result doesn’t tell you anything about if the style of the song fits the dance. But this is also pretty interesting because if you’re going to go all the way and choreograph a first dance, sometimes doing something that’s a little out of a stylistic mismatch can be pretty effective. Choreographing a dance to a song that doesn’t quite fit is frequently done with showcase dances like those you see on Dancing with the Stars and can be very effective in creating a memorable wedding dance.

I hope this helped and that you really enjoy your first dance, not to mention the rest of your wedding and reception.

If you used the second method I mentioned or the help of a professional to find a song/dance combination for any of your wedding dances, please consider becoming part of the music4dance community and adding your wedding songs to the catalog.

As always, I’m very interested in your feedback, so please share any thoughts and ideas about this post or the site by commenting below or using other feedback mechanisms listed here. In addition, if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way makes sense for you.

P.S. This is a reboot of a very early blog post I wrote in 2015. Since the site has been through a couple of significant over-hauls since I wrote the first pair of wedding music posts, I think it’s worthwhile revisiting them. I may end up doing a more systematic rewrite. In that case, I’ll try to figure out a better way to index the posts to remove duplicates and/or make the fresher content pop up ahead of the old content.