Category Archives: Music and Dance

Posts that are about music as it relates to dance and dance as it relates to music.

Music and Dance

Fun Rhythms: Half-time/Double-time – Dancing a Jive and a Slow Foxtrot to the same song

In the first post in this series, I talked about the 12/8 meter. And how, at certain tempos, that allows dancers to legitimately hear a very slow Foxtrot rhythm while someone else (or the same person tuning their ear a little bit differently) can hear and dance to a fast Viennese Waltz. This is one of my favorites, but it is pretty rare.

This time I’d like to touch on the much more common cases of half- and double-time rhythms. Musically, this can be when one person is counting quarter notes, and someone else is counting eighth notes; the second is double-time (or double the tempo) of the first. Or one person hears quarter notes, and the other hears half notes, that being half-time (or half the tempo) of the first.

Bam Bam:

One example of this is Bam Bam by Camila Cabello – One can dance a fast Salsa to that song at 190 beats per minute, or a slow Cha Cha at 95 beats per minute. If you take a look at the sheet music, the official meter is 4/4 with a tempo of a quarter note = 96 beats per minute. But you can also see that most of the melody line is sixteenth notes, and the bass line is dominated by eighth notes, so you can see a potential double-time rhythm.

But more importantly, if you listen to the recording (Spotify or Apple Music), there is a snare drum that’s consistently hitting eighth notes (exposing a 190 bpm tempo), and the actual bass guitar is predominantly playing quarter notes (exposing a 95 bpm tempo).

You Can’t Hurry Love:

In Phil Collins’s You Can’t Hurry Love, the sheet music is listed at 96 bpm. But the bass guitar is playing fairly strong and consistent eighth notes, so the majority of the music4dance community has heard this at double the listed tempo (196 bpm) and voted to dance Quickstep, Single Swing, or Jive to it.

But there is a very strong tambourine on beats two and four that brings out the quarter-note tempo and allows one to hear the 98 bpm natural tempo and dance a Slow Dance or Slow Foxtrot to the same song.

An aside – small discrepancies in tempos:

If you were following along closely, you’ll notice that the listed sheet music tempos are slightly different than the “listening” tempos that are on Music4Dance, even allowing for double-time/half-time considerations. e.g., Bam Bam is listed at 96 bpm in the sheet music, but I (and the algorithm) are actually hearing 95 bpm (or 180 bpm). I’m assuming this is because musicians don’t always follow the exact tempo on the sheet music. Or that whoever transposed to the piano sheet music I’m looking at was listening to a slightly different recording. But it may be because I’m counting slightly off. In any case, it wouldn’t materially change what one would dance to it, so I’m going to leave this little nitpick at that.

And the list goes on:

When You’re Smiling by Michael Buble – A very Slow Foxtrot at 76 BPM or a Quickstep at 151 BPM.

Old Black Magic (the Oscar Peterson version) – A Slow Foxtrot at 104 BPM or a fast Quickstep at 209 BPM.

Why should you care?

As a DJ, these songs are great because dancers who may be comfortable with different dances can dance to the same song, and you’ve got a better chance of filling the dance floor. As a dancer, I’ve always found it fun to dance a fast swing in the middle of the floor while most of the room is dancing a Slow Foxtrot around the perimeter – but that may just be because I’m more comfortable with Swing than Foxtrot.

In addition, spending some time listening to these kinds of nuances is one way (certainly not the only way) to improve your musicality as a dancer.

Finally, I like picking at the edges of these kinds of things, and it is helping me focus a bit on cleaning up the catalog, since there is a strong overlap between these fun rhythms and the places where the algorithmic tempos don’t line up with the dance. So if that is the only real reason for this series, please bear with me, and feel free to skip them – hopefully the end result is a more accurate set of tempo/dance alignments than we had before.

Step of the Month

The “Step of the Month” for August:  This is a small variation on the July Step. Please share an unusual rhythm song (or songs) that you enjoy dancing to. I’m specifically looking for interesting variations that I haven’t mentioned yet in this series. I’ve got one more up my sleeve, but I’d like to continue on this path for more than three posts. But I need some help to do that. Post it in the comment thread here or send feedback.

Fun Rhythms: 12/8 meter- Slow Foxtrot + Viennese Waltz?

Since I’ve added the ability to set the tempo of a dance for a song independently of the tempo of the song itself, I’ve found some renewed energy to go through and clean up some of the inconsistencies that have crept into the music4dance catalog. As I promised (or threatened) when I blogged about the…

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Music and Dance

Fun Rhythms: 12/8 meter- Slow Foxtrot + Viennese Waltz?

Since I’ve added the ability to set the tempo of a dance for a song independently of the tempo of the song itself, I’ve found some renewed energy to go through and clean up some of the inconsistencies that have crept into the music4dance catalog. As I promised (or threatened) when I blogged about the update, I am going to share some of the fun rhythms I find in this process.

12/8 Meter

The first “fun rhythm” I’d like to talk about is the different rhythms a dancer may hear in music written in 12/8. This is effectively 4/4 time where each beat of 4/4 is a triplet, although technically it’s twelve eighth notes per measure (4 *3 = 12).

12/8 musical notation example
My quick demo of what 12/8 looks like on the page.

This post on Jade Bultitude’s site does a much better job of explaining and illustrating the musical part of this than I do.

Dancing to 12/8

The fun thing about this meter is that as a dancer you can count it in two ways – either as a 3/4 measure for each of the triplets or as 4/4 where you hear each triplet as a beat.  Then the triplet rhythm will sometimes work for a Viennese Waltz, and the 4/4 rhythm will work for a slow dance like a Slow Foxtrot, Nightclub Two Step, or Blues. Also note that if you’re looking at the sheet music for a song, you’ll generally see a dotted quarter-note as the measure of tempo, which means a musician is counting the tempo at four beats to a measure, effectively the same as 4/4,

Examples

“Like I’m Gonna Lose You” by Megan Trainor featuring John Legend is listed as West Coast Swing, Castle Foxtrot (e.g. Slow Dance), and Blues at 72 BPM, and Viennese Waltz and Tango Vals at 216 BPM on music4dance. The sheet music shows the tempo as 72 BPM, so I’ve set the main song tempo to that.

The sheet music for “Me and Mrs. Jones” by Michael Buble shows that it is technically in 6/8, but the same principle applies. The music4dance page shows votes for Viennese Waltz at 198.2 BPM and Castle Foxtrot (e.g. Slow Dance) and Slow Foxtrot at 66 BPM (this would be very slow for Slow Foxtrot).

Cataloging

I am still playing with how to tag these kinds of songs. Should I add a 12/8 tempo tag to the songs (*even if they might be technically 6/8 or 4/4 with strong triplets)? Should I put a 3/4 tag on the Waltzes and 4/4 on the Foxtrots, or is that redundant? Would it make sense to put a Compound Time tempo tag on all of these?

Next Steps

I’m going to continue to muddle through manually cleaning up these songs, but it will take some time, since there are a lot of these (and I haven’t even gotten into some of the other fun variations).

If you’re interested in seeing more examples and/or jumping in and cleaning them up, here are a few interesting music4dance searches:

If you are interested in helping, but find the documentation (or the discussion above) too confusing, or if you have thoughts on how to better tag these kinds of songs, please feel free to reach out with questions or comments.

Step of the Month

The “Step of the Month” for July:  Please share an unusual rhythm song (or songs) that you enjoy dancing to. It doesn’t have to be a variation on 12/8 or in any way related to the discussion above, just something that’s a little different that you enjoy. Post it in the comment thread here or send feedback.

Update – July 15th, 2026

An astute reader pointed out that I was conflating the terms meter and rhythm. I believe I’ve cleaned this up in the post; the general idea is that dancers hear and dance to a rhythm, while the time signature or meter is a technical term that is used in written music. I am still going to keep the title of this series as “Fun Rhythms”, since I am using this as a forum to talk about the way some dancers may hear the rhythms in a piece of music differently than others.

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…

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Playing with Dance Tempos

I just rewrote the Tempo tool for the music4dance site as part of the current effort to update the site.  In the process I went back and revisited the reasons for writing the tool in the first place.  The main reason for this tool is to have a single place to do a bit of…

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Song Details

The music4dance song details page contains all of the information that we have gathered about a song, including tags and dances that you may have added. Below is a snapshot of a song details page for “How Sweet it Is” as seen by a user, “Charles”, while he is viewing it. Some of the features…

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Music and Dance

New Feature: Tempo-per-dance, or what if I want to Salsa to this song twice as fast as someone else wants to Cha Cha to it?

1 Comment

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:

Screenshot of “Bam Bam,” showing Salas @ 190 and Cha Cha @ 95bpm
Screenshot of “Bam Bam,” showing Salas @ 190 and Cha Cha @ 95bpm
Salsa search for tempo @190bpm shows “Bam Bam.”
Salsa search for tempo @ 190 bpm shows “Bam Bam.”
Cha Cha search for tempo @95bpm also shows “Bam Bam.”
Cha Cha search for tempo @ 95 bpm also shows “Bam Bam.”

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).

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…

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Enhanced Feature: Editing Tempos and Deleting Tags

Based on some of the comments on my last post, I’ve been thinking more about my early decisions concerning who can edit various aspects of a song in the music4dance catalog. I was worried that malicious actors would mess with the data, and spent considerable time designing and implementing a system that lets me roll…

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What is a fake Waltz?

I was recently asked why there are songs tagged as Waltz in the music4dance catalog that are in 4/4 time.  This seems almost like the dance version of an oxymoron.   In my brief description of the Waltz on the website I start with “Waltzes are dances that are danced to music in 3/4 time…” To…

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

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…

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Music and Dance

Jessica Lang’s ZigZag – Ballet and Bennett

Pacific Northwest Ballet included Jessica Lang’s ZigZag in their All Lang performance this year. While it’s not as directly Ballroom-related as last year’s performance of Nine Sinatra Songs, it was a ballet danced to and inspired by Tony Bennett songs. And similar to Sinatra, Bennett’s songs are often well-suited to Ballroom dances, especially Swing and Foxtrot.

That, combined with some of the work I’ve been doing for other dances choreographed in a very different way, led me down the rabbit hole of exploring the music used in this dance and its history. I think it’s fun to find ideas for music to dance to in many different ways, so please indulge me while I use this as an excuse to highlight some Tony Bennett songs.

The Music

Apparently, the original version of ZigZag, performed by the American Ballet Theatre, was danced to Bennett’s recorded tracks. The version I experienced featured solo piano and was significantly reworked, using a different set of songs (as far as I can tell, only four songs overlap between the two performances). While I have a bit of retroactive FOMO about not having experienced the original version, this does give me eighteen Bennett songs to explore, rather than the tenish that either version would have provided on its own.

The first few Tony Bennett songs used in ZigZag
The first few Tony Bennett songs used in ZigZag

Here is the music4dance link showing the songs from both versions of ZigZag. I marked them all as Ballet — a dance that I added support for, along with a number of other “performance” dances, when I thought I’d see more So You Think You Can Dance (may it rest in peace) performances to catalog. I added partner dances to some of them as they made sense to me. Please feel free to vote on dances for these songs as well.

Nine Sinatra Songs

Since I was taking a look at “Nine Sinatra Songs” for this post, I noticed that I hadn’t added Ballet votes for those songs, and I also hadn’t added the comment with the piece’s and choreographer’s name (since I hadn’t established that convention yet). That is now corrected.

UX Questions

All of this, aside from being a bit of a diversion from the usual, led me to some small, rough spots in the music4dance user experience that I’m not entirely sure how to resolve.

The main thing is that when I’m viewing song lists like those discussed above, I’d really like to see dance tags and comments in the main search results. But things are pretty cluttered as they are, and songs with a bunch of tags end up hogging screen real estate.

I’ve considered making columns customizable. I could also limit what you see per row by default and add an expando so you can see more without going to the song details page. But I’m not sure how much that would help. I could also do the same kind of limiting and just force you to open the song details page if you want to see much more than title/artist and dances. Please let me know if you have any thoughts about this part of the user experience (or any other parts for that matter). Also, I’m always interested in how people are using the site – that’s almost as useful as specific suggestions in solving issues like this.

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).

Nine Sinatra Songs – Ballroom inspired Ballet

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…

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Dance Tags

Dance tags are the heart of the music4dance database. They are the glue that holds dance styles and songs together. These tags are crowd-sourced from our users, our friends’ catalogs, and from public sources. The more that our members vote on dances, the more diverse our catalog will become. There are a number of places…

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New Dance(s): Pattern Dances including Line Dance and Set Partner Dances

I’ve been seeing more interest in what I’ll generically call pattern dances. By this, I mean dances that are set to specific choreography and then danced socially, either in a formation (e.g., line dances) or as partner dances. Since this strays far from my own dance experience, I am struggling both with terminology and how…

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Music and Dance

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

1 Comment

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…

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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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Music and Dance

Nine Sinatra Songs – Ballroom inspired Ballet

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.

Music and Dance

What is that dance called? Swing, East Coast Swing, Triple Swing, East Coast, or…

When I got into the business of categorizing music by dance style, I knew there would be a lot of ambiguity involved. However, some of the passion behind people’s opinions about what a dance should be called or what tempos are acceptable for the dance called X still takes me by surprise. Several times a year, I get an email from someone who is absolutely livid that I “got the tempo of West Coast Swing completely wrong” or called a dance “Lindy Hop” rather than “Swing” or some other variation on the theme.

I learn a lot from the people who send these emails, and often learn something that helps me improve the site or my general knowledge of dance. One feature I added a while back, based on some of these interactions but haven’t discussed in the blog, was the idea of having “synonyms” for dances.

The way music4dance works, I have to have an unambiguous and unique name for a dance. This leads to somewhat clunky names at times – for instance, the dance that most dances consider “Waltz,” I call “Slow Waltz” to distinguish it from “Viennese Waltz” and to allow for a catch-all category of Waltz. But I want to be able to show other names for dances so people can find the dances even if they know them by another name. This applies both to cases where the dance really is the exact same dance; it’s just named differently to disambiguate it, and in cases where the parameters for what music works are close enough that it makes sense to use the same list of music for both dances.

Cases of actual synonyms:

Cases where the dances are different, but the music is the same:

  • Castle Foxtrot = Slow Dance – I started categorizing music that was basically Slow Dance music as Castle Foxtrot, which is a legacy dance that some studios occasionally teach because Castle Foxtrot showed up in my searches as I was designing the site, and fit nicely into the tempo spectrum of Foxtrot-like dances. The practical use of this ended up being more for people looking for “Slow Dance” music in wedding contexts, so I added the Slow Dance synonym. Perhaps I should change the primary name?
  • Hustle = DiscoFox – As far as I can tell, these have evolved into different dances but are still danced to similar music. But that is based on web searching rather than personal experience, so please correct me if I’m wrong. I’m also now second-guessing myself as to whether I should add “Swing Fox,” “Disco Swing,” and “Rock Fox” as synonyms, or if one or more of these rates is its own category.

In any case, if you go to the main “Dance Style” page, you’ll see all the styles we’ve set up, along with their synonyms. As this list grows, being able to filter it is more important, so the filter control acts on both the primary name and the synonym. I also handle the synonyms when you search in the search control in the menu bar. So if you type “Slow Dance” in that search box, you’ll find a list of slow dance songs (that are actually tagged as “Castle Foxtrot”). I don’t convert the name of the tag in the results, but I could if that seems important…

I’m posting this now in part because, during my recent round of updates, I broke the showing of synonyms in the Dance Styles page and then realized I hadn’t ever asked for feedback on the feature. The only mention in this blog was the post when I added it as an afterthought to adding Single Swing to the catalog.

Are there other synonyms that I should add? Are there dances that I’ve listed as synonyms that I should break out into separate dances? If you have ideas about this post or the site, 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.

Music and Dance

Western Partner Dances and Line Dances?

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One of the comments on my last post asked:

A lot of our dance groups over here love to dance the partnered dance sea shells The song “Blue night” by Michael learns to Rock sings the song they dance to. Is there a list on your data base of similar songs to that one that they can also dance Sea Shells to?

This question lead me down one of those beautiful rabbit holes that dance often does.

I had never heard of this dance, but I looked it up and found a YouTube video with the choreographer demonstrating the dance. It was 32 counts (four 8-counts) danced line of dance using a vocabulary that I’m not familiar with but would guess was some flavor of country dance.

Now, when I was learning to lead as a ballroom dancer, my teacher often put together a few eight counts of choreography that I could use so that I wouldn’t have to think as much about what my next move was and concentrate instead on leading my partner and making sure I didn’t run into anyone (or step on my partner’s feet). I understand this is a common technique in the Ballroom community. I ran across similar methods when learning social dances in group classes. So my first instinct was – this is just a slightly more formalized version of that technique – and it has the advantage that your follow knows that you will be doing this same sequence, so the lead should be much easier.

Following that thread, I listened to the song more closely and counted it out. It’s about 97BPM 4/4 and had the feel of an International Rumba or Bolero to me. This gave me the first level answer to the question of what else would someone play if people wanted to dance “Sea Shells” – I went to Advanced Search and selected Bolero and Rumba, limited the tempo to 95-99 BPM (an arbitrary bracket around 97 BPM) and sorted by the most popular – that resulted in this list. I’m convinced that someone who learned “Sea Shells” could dance it to any of the top songs on the list.

But I felt like I was missing something fundamental about this type of dance, and I dug deeper. I didn’t have to do much searching to find a “Dance Step Sheet” with the specific choreography that Dan and Kelly Alboro created. In fact, there were a bunch of places that listed this dance and described the steps. Poking around the websites that hosted such sheets, I found that this is a whole thing. Please pardon my ignorance here since I’m sure many people reading this post know more about such things than I do, but the concept of choreographing a few eight counts of a partner dance and naming it was completely new to me.

My understanding from a relatively brief perusal of these sites is that there is a branch of country dancing similar to line dancing where someone choreographs a number of eight counts using a specific vocabulary, teaches it at an event, and then a whole group of people can dance the same “dance.” The most experience I’ve had with these personally is Wedding Line Dances, but it seems like a fun experience. Doing this kind of dance with a partner rather than the individual line dances I’ve seen in the past feels like a great way to become more comfortable as a partner dancer. In any case, I’ll put a bunch of links at the bottom of this post to sites written by people who know a lot more about this than I do.

Back to the original question: Another answer is that some of the “Dance Step Sheets” for “Sea Shells” list an alternate song that it can be danced to. The song they list is “jumpin’ the jetty” by Coastline. Now, this is a song that shouts Swing to me and is considerably faster (126BPM) than “Blue Night.” So that blows my original thought out of the water. Here is a search for swing songs between 124 and 128BPM. Unsurprisingly, there is no overlap between this list and the one I generated for “Blue Night.” I suspect someone who knows the choreography well can probably dance it to any reasonably consistent 4/4 music at a wide range of tempos. For those who are less expert, there is perhaps an advantage to being on the slower side and having strong phrasing. And I’m sure there are plenty of folks who only want to dance this particular dance to the music that they learned it to in the first place. But as I’ve said repeatedly, I’m way out of my depths here, so if someone who actually knows something about this kind of dancing would care to jump in and help me out, please do.

The last thing I wanted to say about this subject is that I’ve had several requests to support country and line dances on the site. I plan to enable the more traditional country partner dances once I get past some infrastructure issues that are currently blocking me from adding a bunch of new dances. I’m confident I can do that and seed the lists from reliable sources to get something up and running despite my lack of specific knowledge of those dances. Then, hopefully members of the community who know more about those dances can add more. Please let me know if you’re interested in this feature. The more people raise their hands for this feature, the faster it will move up my TODO list.

I hadn’t devised a method for handling line dances before this, partly because I assumed they were all choreographed to a single song. It didn’t seem like the system I’d built would handle that very well. But based on this experience, I’ve come up with a way to “support” line dances without adding code. I’ll throw it out there, and if anyone wants to start adding line dances to the database, I’ll document it more closely and possibly even add some code to make the experience smoother. The idea is pretty simple. Just add a comment with a quoted version of the name of the line dance to the song. Then, people can search on that and get a list of songs to line dance to. Here’s the search for “Sea Shells,” which returns the two songs I’ve discussed in this post.

I will dig myself out of the rabbit hole for now and see if I can make some progress on the infrastructure issue I mentioned above.

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.

Some interesting links related to the Western Partner dances:

Copper Knowb Stepsheets

DiceMemory Parter / Circle Dances

DiceMemory Line Dance Steps

CoutryDancingTonight – 10 Popular Partner Country Dances

Wikipedia – Partner Dance

Wikipedia – Country Western Dance

Wikipedia – Round Dance

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…

msc4dnc's avatar 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…

msc4dnc's avatar by msc4dnc
Music and Dance

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 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.

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