One of the things I’ve been struggling with since very early on in the music4dance story is the fact that not everyone hears the same rhythm when they dance to the same song. Struggling isn’t the right word – it’s a difficult technical problem to solve in the context of the music4dance song index, but a delightful result of the plurality of both music and dance (and musicians and dancers) that I celebrate.

In any case, I believe I’ve finally arrived at a reasonable solution, and it’s up and running on the site. You can now specify that a song is danced at 180bpm for Lindy Hop without trouncing on another dancer’s opinion that it should be danced at 95bpm for Night Club Two Step. And, most importantly, you can filter on Night Club Two Steps between 90 and 95bpm in advanced search, and that song will be included. And a search for Lindy Hops between 175 and 180 bpm will also include our hypothetical song.

I almost stalled out while writing this post because there are so many variations in tempo-per-dance. It’s a rabbit hole I could fall down and not emerge from for a very long time. I clawed my way out of that particular hole by promising myself that I would take time to write a series of posts, each one concentrating on one of the variations. We’ll see how that goes.

Bam Bam

And just to give a concrete example, “Bam Bam” by Camila Cabello was one of the songs that got me over the hump to implement this feature. A couple of sources listed this song as Salsa at 190 bpm, but one of the DJs who contributes to music4dance emailed me to let me know that he has been playing it at his dances as a Cha Cha, where folks dance to it at 95 bpm. And since he is a thorough researcher, he looked it up, and it’s listed at 95 bpm on the official sheet music. So, for a while, I had this song listed at 95 bpm for both Salsa and Cha Cha. But now it is one of the first songs I have corrected to use different tempos for different dances:

Where to go from here?

I’m spending some time tracking down the songs that are the most egregious offenders that can be corrected with this improvement. That includes things like the 4/4 songs that are half-time/double time of each other. Along these lines, I’ll probably implement more tempo constraints for dances to help me find such offenders – see “Ask music4dance: Why are the tempos that music4dance lists for Salsa wrong?” for more info. If you have thoughts on these kinds of tempo constraints, please let me know.

I’ll also be taking another look at Waltzes that are either marked as 4/4 or danced to other types of dances, since this is generally another flag that something funny is going on with rhythms and tempos.

Are there other places that you’ve noticed tempo listings conflicting with your expectations based on the dances you know well? If so, please take a run at fixing them up – I’ve moved to enabling more community modifications of these attributes, so with this change and updated documentation, hopefully you can fix things that look wrong to you – if not, I’d like to know so that I can improve the feature.

Step of the Month

The “Step of the Month” for June is to check your account management page. It is nice to see the songs another user has tagged. This information is available only to other logged-in members of the community, so please consider making your information available to the community by checking the “Share my Profile” option to improve other members’ experience (the alternative is that your votes and tags are attributed to an anonymous user, which is much less friendly).