All posts by msc4dnc

I'm a software engineer currently taking some time to reboot my brain.
Music and Dance

Do Dancers Think in Eights?

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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 young competitors, choreographed to “Rather Be” by the Pentatonix.  Just amazing – pause for a moment of silent appreciation for some real talent.

Nigel asked if she choreographed by listening to the rhythm or by counting eights. Quickly followed by the statement – “Musicians only count to four, dancers count to eight.”  Funny!

Besides making for a pithy quote, it ties right into a project that I’ve been working on recently.  I am experimenting with a phone application that I hope will be useful to choreographers and one of the things that I’ve been thinking about is phrasing of music.  It’s a variation on the web-app that I have on the site for counting out tempos. When choreographing for many ballroom dances, the basic unit of measure tends to be a two-measure mini-phrase, which would be 8 counts in most dances and 6 for the waltz.  And then there are longer phrases, which are closer to what musicians think in.  Here’s a quick mock-up of the phrasing page for the app – the idea is that you can count out (or just enter) the tempo of the song, choose a standard length and get a quick cheat-sheet of the number of phrases of various types that one would need to choreograph to fill the song.

Phrasing Page

Would this be useful to you as a choreographer?  Are there other features that might make as much or more sense to have your phone figure out for you?  I’m always looking for feedback, and the early the better since most of this isn’t even coded yet.

Archive

Content over Code

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As an engineer, I have a rather extreme tendency to dive into code when trying to improve the site.  That has resulted in some pretty cool features – Check out EchoNest Integration, Finding Foxtrot Music and Cross-referencing Dance Styles just to name a few.  As a dancer, however, it’s pretty obvious that new content is the most important part of a site like music4dance.  To that end, I’m going to keep new features to the minimum and concentrate on improving the content.

Last week I added descriptions to all of the “Other” category of dance styles, and I believe I managed to get some better content for both Polka and Country Two Step.  I’m happy to take feedback on those dances from the experts, as neither of them land anywhere to my core proficiency.  Also – if anyone is willing to tutor me on country dances in general, I believe I could get something similar to what I have for ballroom competition categories up and running reasonably easily.

Overall, I hope to bulk out descriptions and start adding new songs to the catalog on a more regular basis as well as delving a bit more into the relationship between music and partner dancing in the form of some more content rich blog posts.

Archive

“Search like Google” is now the default

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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 default (see What if I just want to search for songs on music4dance like I do on Google? and Search like Google Part II: Autocomplete, Filter by Dance Style and Sorting for some background).   Anything you do on the site whether it’s browsing or searching you should be using the new features by default.

If you are having problems with the new search, for now you can go to the Music->Song Library->Legacy Search->Search (Legacy) or Music->Song Library->Legacy Search->Advanced Search pages to use the old methods of searching.

Give both a try and let me know what you think.  I’ll leave both the new and the legacy search capabilities up on the site for a bit so that you can compare and contrast, but I’m working hard to test and get all of the functionality moved over to the new system so that I can delete the old one.

Bug reports are welcome here. If you end up having to use legacy search for any reason, please let me know.  Also, if you land on pages that are marked ‘legacy’ without having gone to them explicitly, a bug report or email would be really helpful.   And as always please submit any general feedback or suggestions here.

The Google Miniseries:

Searching for Music

Search like Google Part III: Advanced Search – The Best of Both Worlds?

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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 with the remaining features for our search beta (see What if I just want to search for songs on music4dance like I do on Google? and Search like Google Part II: Autocomplete, Filter by Dance Style and Sorting for some background).  You should now be able to take advantage of both the new features like auto-complete and simple Google/Bing style searches with all of the dance specific features like filtering by tempo and dance style using the Advanced Search Beta.

Give both a try and let me know what you think.  I’ll leave both the beta and the legacy search capabilities up on the site for a bit so that you can compare and contrast.  Bug reports are welcome here.  And as always please submit any general feedback or suggestions here.

The Google Miniseries:

Music and Dance

What are your favorite Prince songs for partner dancing?

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Update 2024: The content of the post is still generally accurate. There is a more recent post that outlines a new feature that adds yet another way to narrow down songs that have “Prince” in the artist’s name. New Feature: Improved Text Searching

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.  Of course a lot of his seminal work has more of a blues feel that I would associate with West Coast Swing (or possibly even more directly blues dancing).  But there are certainly some things in his catalog that one might Quickstep to (Let’s Go Crazy) or dance a Slow Foxtrot (Strollin‘) to.

Here’s a link to the list of Price songs currently in the music4dance catalog.  If you’ve got other favorites (along with what you would dance to them) let me know by responding to this post or sending feedback and I’d be happy to add them.  Or sign in and vote on what style you would dance to the songs already in the catalog.

The Prince Feature

One of the things that I noticed as I was looking for Prince music in the music4dance catalog was that I hadn’t implemented an artist page of any kind.  You could search for Prince but you would both get everything I had catalog by Prince and everything by Prince Royce songs with Prince in the title.  So I did a quick fix – if you click an artist’s name you’ll be taken to a page with a list of the first 100 songs I’ve catalog by that artist.  Since I’m only tracking artist by the full name this has a couple of implications, one of which is that Leader of the Band won’t show up under Prince since the artist is actually “Sheila E. featuring Prince and The E Family.”

You can, of course, still search for Prince and manually go through the songs to find the ones that actually involve Prince, but that’s obviously not the perfect solution.  How much does this matter to you?  Is it important to have a more specific idea of artist when you’re sorting through songs to dance to?

As always, please send me feedback or just respond to this post with any issues or ideas.

Searching for Music

Search like Google Part II: Autocomplete, Filter by Dance Style and Sorting

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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 am continuing to rebuild the music4dance database capabilities in the more intuitive style of current search engines like Google and Bing – the initial attempt at this is documented in this post.

Auto-Complete

Auto-complete is something everyone expects when searching these days.  So if you were to type “Peab” into the search box on the simple search page you should see suggestions like the following pop-up:

  • Peabody
  • Peabo Bryson
  • Tonight, I Celebrate My Love (feat. Peabo Bryson)
  • Peabo Bryson & Regina Belle
  • Peabo Bryson And Roberta Flack
  • Love and Rapture: The Best of Peabo Bryson

And just like Bing or Google, clicking on the selection will take you to a list of songs that contain the selected text.

The thing that is a little different for music4dance than a generic search is that one might want to do combinations of things like a fragment of a title and a dance style name.  I haven’t figured out an easy way to do that, but as always I’m open to suggestions.

Filter by Dance Style

But I can fall back to the original way that I landed on for just searching within a single dance style.  So now on the Simple Search page, you can select a dance style from the drop down to the left of the search box and we’ll just show you results for that dance style.  So if you select Cha Cha and then type “tea” into the search box you should get only songs that have the word tea somewhere in the description that have also been tagged as Cha Cha.

Sorting

And finally, I’ve implemented sorting by Title, Artist, Tempo, Beat, Energy, Mood and Recency.  Just click on the appropriate heading in the Simple Search Page, just like you did in the classic search page.  I’m still looking for a reasonable way to sort by votes on dance style.

The Google Miniseries:

Archive

Mobile First improvements to the music4dance website

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Update 2024: While the UI is a bit out of date in this post, I’ve preserved the mobile improvements discussed here (and continued to move towards a more useful mobile experience with additional improvements).

Most of the time that I use music4dance it’s on desktop computer, but I certainly want access to all of what it can do on my phone and tablet.  And I have tried to take what user interface designers call a “Mobile First” approach whenever possible.

But I noticed a while back that there are a few things that just weren’t working as well on smaller devices as I would like.  Several of them were on the core song list pages, which is particularly important.

So I finally took a couple of days off from other things and reworked these issues.

The Play Menu

The play menu (which is documented here) is now a modal which allows for bigger buttons and the ability to control the sample being played.

Play Menu
Play Menu (on the old site)
Play and Purchase
Play and Purchase Controls (new and improved)

Dance and Tag Menus

I’ve also converted the dance and tag menus (documented here) to modals.  This let me make the buttons bigger as well as adding some styling that I hope will let you navigate through options more easily.  The large chunks of text in the old interface were hard to distinguish even for the person that wrote them.

Dance Menu
Dance Menu (on the old site)
Play Menu
Dance Information (new and improved)
Tag Menu
Tag Menu (on the old site)
Tag Information
Tag Information (new and improved)

Let me know what you think.  Do you prefer the before or after?  Are there other aspects of the site that you find difficult to use on a small device?  Let me know by responding to this post or sending feedback.

Searching for Music

What if I just want to search for songs on music4dance like I do on Google?

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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.

One of the things that I’ve had a lot of fun with is building a sophisticated search engine where I (and you) can do things like find songs that someone has tagged as Waltz and someone else has tagged as Foxtrot.  Or find all swing songs that are in a particular tempo range.  There are lots of neat things that you can do with the Advanced Search system if you’ve got some knowledge of dance and music and want to dig deep into these corners of the music4dance catalog.

But what if you just want to search through the catalog the same way you would on Google or Bing?   For instance, what if you’re looking for a song that has been tagged as Wedding and has the words “Love” and “Time” in it?  With simple search you can just type Wedding Love Time into the search box and you’ll get some useful results.  You can further refine the search by using some of the standard search modifiers like + and – and putting quotes (“) around phrases to be more precise about your searches (for instance try “First Dance” +Foxtrot +Rock).  But if you’re the type that doesn’t bother with that on Google you should be fine not worrying about it here as well.

More information is available on the help page but you should be able to go to Simple Search from the “Music” menu on the music4dance home page and dive right in.

The Google Miniseries:

About music4dance

EchoNest Integration – Loads of new tempo, meter and other information to help you find music to dance to

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I’ve cross indexed the music4dance catalog  with the EchoNest database and exposed some new features.

The most fundamental improvement is that EchoNest provides tempo and simple meter information.  So I’ve been able to add tempo information to a number of songs that I didn’t have cataloged that way before.  And I’ve also added the time signature tags to these songs.

But more importantly, EchoNest does some interesting analysis of the music to come up with some acoustic attributes to describe a song musically.  They are:

  • beat-10 Beat: An attempt to characterize the strength and consistency of the beat.
  • Energy-10Energy: The intensity and power of the music – this is probably the most intuitive of the attributes.
  • mood-10 Mood: A measure of the mood from positive or happy down to sad or angry.

I am representing each of these attributes as a graphical column headed with an appropriate icon (drum for beat, flame for energy and smile for mood).  Each column is sortable both from high to low and low to high and when I have data for a song, the icon in that song’s row is ‘filled’ to a proportional amount.  EchoNest provides a number from 0 .0 to 1 .0 and I translate that into icons that are 0 to 100% filled (in 10 bands).

More information on this integration can be found on the help page.  Or just head over to the music library and start experimenting.

For instance, here is a snapshot of a list of songs that are tagged as “First Dance,” can be danced to some form of Foxtrot and contain the word “Love“.  They are sorted by “Beat” from strongest to weakest.  If you’re looking for a song to dance your first dance to and aren’t an experienced dancer, you probably want a strong beat.

EchoNest

What do you think?  Are there other acoustic attributes that I should include?  Would you like to be able to sort on multiple attributes on the same time or filter on one attribute and sort on another?  These are all entirely possibly, but I need your help to prioritize these features.  Please feel free to reply to this post or leave feedback with any thoughts you have on this set of features.

About music4dance

Quality over Quantity?

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One of the things that I’m struggling with in the music4dance project is the pull between finding lots of recommendations for songs to dance to against the desire that those recommendations being in some sense ‘good.’  As I noted in my last post, more manual curating will certainly help.

Another way to attack this problem is to tune down the mechanical methods I’m using to find recommendations.  So for now I’ve changed the default for most dance recommendations to only pull up songs that someone has explicitly noted are good to dance to that particular style. So, for instance, the Carolina Shag catalog doesn’t get polluted by songs that someone has tagged generically as ‘Swing‘ that happen to be a reasonable tempo to dance Carolina Shag to.  And the top 10 lists for individual dance style pages are filtered the same way.

Hopefully this will give you a better start at ‘core’ songs that work for each dance style.  Check it out and let me know what you think.

P.S.  What if you’re interested in getting the broader range of recommendations?  Say you’re looks for songs that might work to dance a style to that might not be quite the musical style that is normally danced to.  There are a couple of things you can do.  First, you can go to advanced search page and check the “Include Inferred” check-box.  This will give you the old results where we pull in songs that are marked with a related dance style and are of an appropriate tempo.  Or you can just do a tempo filter on the advanced search page and see what comes up…