A number of people have pointed out that my attempt to generalize the “rules” that I use to pick Ballroom music, especially slightly edgy ballroom music have caused the social music parts of the music4dance catalog to veer a bit (or more than a bit) off course. One way to solve this is to spend some time on each of the social dances and see if I can get some more concentrated people knowledge to help contribute to a better list.
And since I’m going to be taking Bachata lessons for the first time starting next week, that seems like a great place to start. I’ve pulled together a couple of the albums that the teacher recommended and some Bachatas from a few other sources to get an initial list together here. What do you think? Am I anywhere close to a decent list? What am I missing or what is on this list that you absolutely wouldn’t dance Bachata to?
The other thing I noticed is that it looks like Bachata has a broad enough history that it may make sense to either split them up (like I did with Tango) or maybe more reasonably start tagging them by sub-style?
Please feel free to respond to this post with song ideas or more general suggestions. You’re also welcome to sign in to the site and start voting on songs. And if you’re not a Bachata expert, that’s all right, there is plenty of room for improvement elsewhere in the catalog.
One of the first things that I wanted to do with the music4dance project was to build a system where dancers could vote on whether a song worked for a particular dance style. That morphed into something more like “do you like to dance style x to song y.” Which still seemed like a pretty reasonable system. And I started using heart symbols to show like/indifferent/don’t like for the dance style entries on each song.
But then Amanda (the music4dance intern) pointed out that there wasn’t any way to actually say that you liked or disliked a song. So we implemented a top-level like/indifferent/don’t like for each song and I used the same heart symbols. But then things got confusing, since you could vote to like to dance a particular style to a song as well as make a song as something that you like.
I still think that there is a value in both of these attributes. For me the overriding value of the like/dislike a song is to be able to dislike a song and not have to see it again. Especially for a song that I may have particular bad associations with – a song that was massively overplayed in a dance studio, for instance. These are particularly troublesome as they are probably overplayed because they are well suited to a particular dance style, so I certainly don’t want to exclude them from other people’s searches by voting them down for matching that dance style.
In any case, this came to a head while I was implementing the quick voting mechanisms where you can like/dislike a song anytime you see it in a list – any kind of search results or dance style details pages. Once I got that feature in, I saw that it was so much easier to like/dislike a song than it was to vote on whether you find a song dance-able to a particular style. And that made me sad, since I think the dance-able vote is much more interesting (and also why you would be looking at a site like this rather than a purely music rating/referral site).
So I added in the voting link to the songs in any list where there is a single dance being listed. This includes the dance style pages as well as any searches where you choose just one dance to search on (like for instance, this list of all of our East Coast Swing songs). And while I was doing that, I started using the shoe symbol rather than the heart symbol for voting which helps with the ambiguity.
Well this all works, and I’m reasonably happy with the results. But I’m not sure I’ve minimized the number of clicks that you would use on average. Should I assume that you like a song if you vote it up as a good Cha-Cha – you could still explicitly dislike it for those cases where you actually don’t like the song even if you agree that it’s a particularly good song to dance the Cha-Cha to.
Why don’t you give it a try and let me know what you think. Go to your favorite dance page (find them here) and try both voting on the songs as dance-able to that dance (by clicking the shoe icon) and liking/disliking them as songs (by clicking the heart icon) and let me know what you think. Feedback is always welcome via the music4dance feedback form or our company email info@music4dance.net.
About of a third of the songs were already in the music4dance catalog and had been matched to dance styles. Most of the others were songs that I could imagine partner dancing to, although some were a stretch. I made a lot of use of the “Unconventional” tag to try to show that many of these songs don’t exhibit all of the traditional attributes of the music that these dances grew up with. But that’s part of the fun of this project, and dancing in general – testing the limits of how music and dance fit together.
And of course, not all music is particularly suited to dancing of any kind. So my version of Spotify’s top 100 list ended up being only 87 songs because those were the songs that I could match any kind of partner dance, even stretching the traditional definitions.
Here’s a link to that list. You can build this link yourself (and try some variations) by going to the Advanced Search Form, clicking on the brown pencil (other) tag button in the “include tags” row of the form. Then choose tags to include – in this case I chose “2015” and “Top 100“. Clicking the search button will show the first page of the top 100 (errrr 87) songs and what dances I and others have matched with those songs. Check out the documentation for more details.
One fun variation on this search is to add the tag DWTS (for Dancing With The Stars) to this search. You end up with 21 songs that were both used in the last couple of seasons of DWTS and are on the Spotify Top 100 list for 2015. Another fun thing to do is to add your favorite style of dance to the search, if I added West Coast Swing to the Top 100 list, I’d end up with these 25 songs. (at least today – if other’s vote up songs as West Coast Swing, that number may change),
Do you disagree with my choice of dances for any of these songs? I would love to see what you have to say. Please feel free to comment on this post. Or register or log in to start tagging and voting on songs yourself.
Next year I expect that we’ll have enough activity to generate a top 100 list directly from the songs that you’ve chosen.
I know for me there are a few songs that I spent way too much time listening to while learning choreography or cutting medleys. I never want to hear them again, much less dance to them. And as much as I love music, there are some songs that I just don’t like right off the bat. So I don’t want either of these showing up time after time because other people find them to be particularly good Rumba or Foxtrot music.
Up to now that’s been a bit of a problem with the music4dance site since there wasn’t a way to explicitly like or not like a song, Everything was based on collective voting to match a song with a dance. But today I’ve added a feature where you can like and dislike a song. Then by default when you’re signed into the site, you won’t see those songs in your searches.
While I was at it, I added a few additional ways to filter searches based on how you’ve tagged and liked songs. Check them out on the Advanced Search page (remember you have to be signed into your account and have tagged or liked some songs for this to be useful).
And while you’re thinking about this, I have a question. What is a reasonable opposite of ‘like’ in this case? I’ve been using ‘not like’, but hate seems like it might be more accurate. Unlike and dislike were other options. But none of these seem quite right. If you’ve got any ideas, please comment on this post and let me know.
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 theSimple Search and Advanced Search documentation for how the current user interface works.
Music4Dance was conceived to help dancers find music that inspires them to dance. My posts about this from last year are still right on point even if the screenshots are a bit out of date. I have been adding capabilities to the music4dance advanced search control as they are suggested and as time permits. And it got a bit out of control, so to speak. As of yesterday, that control looked like this:
And now thanks to some hard work by the fabulous music4dance intern, the advanced search form looks like this:
Much improved, no? Basic documentation is available here and we’ll be updating the rest of the affected documentation shortly. We’re also looking at other advanced search features. Saving your searches and making it easier to filter on songs that you have tagged are two of our top candidates. What else would you like to see? Please let me know by leaving feedback in the comments section of this page or via our feedback form.
The quick answer is to just click this link where you will find a list of over a thousand songs that have been labeled as Foxtrot.
But that’s definitely not the full answer. In that list you will find songs that are too fast or too slow for you to dance to because the Foxtrot is not just one dance style but a family of dances each of which can be danced to a different range of tempos.
When I first started dancing my teachers were from a background that was influenced by American Smooth style of Ballroom dance. So there was a very specific dance that I first learned as “The Foxtrot”. This is what is more precisely known as American Style Foxtrot and the was danced in the range of 30 measures per minute plus or minus a bit depending on competition rules.
In order to answer the more precise question of what kind of music will work for the dance that you are learning, it helps to get a bit of a historical perspective. The Foxtrot follows a pretty common pattern in how partner dances evolve. A style is first danced socially and pulls in moves from multiple traditions. Often something resembling the social dance is performed on stage by exhibition dancers as well. As the style becomes established, teachers take it and formalize it and possibly simplify it for their students. Then social dancers start pulling in things from different traditions and the dance evolves. Sometimes it gets renamed, and sometimes the dance with the same name is just danced differently depending on where and when a dancer learned the style. And never forget the influence of the music that is evolving alongside the dances, perhaps speeding up or slowing down or changing in character in a way that influences how dancers dance to it.
In the case of the Foxtrot, two of the early influences were Peabody and the Tango. The Peabody was a very fast “one step” dance, and the Tango was imported from Argentina via Paris. Harry Fox is the exhibition dancer who lent the Foxtrot his name. Vernon and Irene Castle are the teachers who first formalized the Foxtrot as well as using it in their performances.
Arthur Murray standardized the particular version of the Foxtrot that I learned. He also revived the Peabody as a competition dance to occupy the fast end of the Foxtrot style dances, as he felt that it was more reasonable for students to learn than the slightly slower but more complicated Quickstep.
At some point Charleston influences crept in as a style dance-able to faster music developed, called appropriately, the Quickstep.
To round out this family of dance styles I’ve adopted the name Castle Foxtrot to represent the slowest variations. Much of the music that I’ve cataloged as Castle Foxtrot has been labeled by others as Slow Dance, especially when it relates to Wedding Dances. Many of the moves that are used in Foxtrot can be slowed down and made to stay in place (or on spot) to create something that is much more elegant than the side to side swaying that I first “learned” as a slow dance.
Here is a snapshot of the Foxtrot filter of the music4dance Tempi Tool, as a jumping off point to help you find music in an appropriate tempo for your style of Foxtrot. Just click on any of the tempo ranges to get Foxtrot music in that range.
With the full tool on the music4dance site you can dig further into the relationship between dances and tempos.
Foxtrot was further complicated by the fact that it co-evolved very closely with swing and was often danced to the same music, or at least music played by the same bands. I’ll take at look at what I’ve been categorizing as the Swing family of dances next.
Does this categorization help you at all in how you think about dancing and how it relates to music. Is there a different way that you would slice and dice these dances?
One thing that I completely over-simplified in my description was the influence of regional traditions. Would anyone from around the world care to shed some light on your regional influences to the Foxtrot?
After several rounds of closed beta, I’m ready to open up the account management and tag editing features as public betas.
The tag editor is the first of a number of features that I’m planning that will enable you to customize your music4dance experience. With the tag editor you can tag songs and the relationships between songs and dance styles based on your own tastes and then use the tag filtering tools to create song lists based on your own tags as all the tags already in the system. In addition, just the act of tagging a song adds it to your master list of songs.
Get started by registering. Then take a quick look at the documentation and get started. Or for the more daring among you, just start tagging songs and see what happens.
Thanks for trying this feature. Please submit bugs and feature requests with our bug report form.
There are a bunch of different reasons that you might want to build lists of songs that are more sophisticated than just the songs that can be danced to a specific style. For instance you may be choreographing a piece that you want to switch between Cha Cha and East Coast Swing. Or you might want to get a more comprehensive list of songs that are in the Bolero/Rumba range so you want everything that’s tagged with either of those dance styles. Or, you’re like me and just want to see what dances people have tagged as both Waltz and Foxtrot (two apparently contradictory labels – more on that in a future post).
I’ve just added a feature that enables all of those scenarios. The documentation is here, but let me break a couple of the scenarios down into specifics.
First, let’s say you’re looking for a song to choreograph a mixed East Coast Swing/Cha Cha routine to. Here’s what you do:
Go to the song list page by clicking on Music -> Songs in the menu at the top of the music4dance.net website.
Click on the “more” button near the top of the page
Click on the “any” button that appears and choose “all”
Click in the text box that says “Choose some dance styles…” and start typing “East Coast Swing”, after the first letter or two you should be able to choose from a list. Do the same with Cha Cha
Click on the search (magnifier) button and you should see a list of songs all of which are tagged with both East Coast Swing and Cha Cha
Next, let’s take a look at finding a mixed list of songs. For example, if we want to find all songs that are labeled as either Rumba or Bolero, here’s what you do:
Go to the song list page by clicking on Music -> Songs in the menu at the top of the music4dance.net website.
Click on the “more” button near the top of the page
Make sure that the “any” button that next to the “Dance to” label reads “any.” If it reads “all” then click to choose “any.”
Click in the text box that says “Choose some dance styles…” and start typing “Bolero”, after the first letter or two you should be able to choose from a list. Do the same with Rumba
Click on the search (magnifier) button and you should see a list of songs all of which are tagged with both East Coast Swing and Cha Cha
I hope this is useful to you. If there are combinations of dances that you find particularly useful, please let me know by commenting. Similarly, if there are combinations that you can’t manage with the current implementation please comment and I’ll look at extending this capability even more.
Update (May 2024): Music4dance has evolved enough that this post is stale. Please check out the updated version of this post for current information.
The quick answer to this question is yes, definitely!
First, many of the songs in our catalog have been tagged with a tempo, so it is easy to get a list of suggestions. However, these are tempi that have been sourced from all over the web, so please use this as a first approximation rather than some kind of official source.
That said, it’s very easy to get a list of songs of a particular tempo. Just go to the song list page (the “Songs” item in the “Music” menu), choose the style of dance you’re interested in practicing [A] and click on the “More” button [B].
Then you can fill the minimum tempo (C) an the maximum temp (D), and click the search button (E) to get a list of songs.
If the list is empty we haven’t tagged any songs in that tempo range for that dance style. Which is the perfect segue into the another way to do this kind of search.
If you are competing in a particular category (International Standard, International Latin, American Smooth and American Rhythm), you can go to the info page for that category by clicking on the name of the category on the Ballroom Dancer section of the home page or at the bottom of the dance style page. The core of each of these pages is a table with the dances styles for that competition category and the competition tempo ranges. The tempo ranges are active links to just the kind of song search that I described in the last paragraph. Starting here will assure that you’ve started with the approved competition tempo range. Full documentation for the dance category pages can be found here.
Finally, if you are practicing a particular dance you can start from the dance style page (from the “Dances” item in the “Music” menu) and click on the dance style that you’re practicing. The tempo info link on that page will take you to the same table as the category page but with just the single dance style specified. Full documentation for the dance style pages can be found here.
Hope that helps. If you are interested in helping refine our catalog (by, for instance, adding ‘strict’ tags) please sign up for our upcoming beta via this feedback form, or use the same form to report incorrect tempi or other information in our database.
I’ve added a brief description of the tag cloud page, as well as modifying the documentation for the song list and dance style pages to reflect changes that I made to add capabilities to filter on tags. With this the documentation is roughly up to date with the code (a strangely odd feeling from a programmer’s perspective) and I’ll be rolling out a beta for user tags soon. If you’re interested in participating in the beta, please sign up via this feedback form.
music4dance 