Category Archives: Searching for Music

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

Searching for Music

Ask music4dance: How do I find a song that people can dance West Coast Swing and Foxtrot to, or Cha Cha and Rumba, or…

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Some of the most vocal members of the music4dance community are folks who either DJ for their studio’s dances or help build the playlists for their community dances, or some variation of the two. The common thread is that they’re using music4dance at various points in their processes and have been kind enough to share the details with me. This has resulted in a number of features that I am sure help more members of the community than my original interlocutor. Thanks again to everyone who has taken the time to share their experiences with music4dance.

The topic at hand is a recent email expressing appreciation for the ability to use the advanced search feature to find songs that can be danced to two or more different dance styles. I realize that I last blogged about this feature in 2015, before I moved the advanced search features to their own page. I missed this post in the review I went through last year to try to update some of the most out-of-date posts and archive the old ones. So I appreciate the reminder.

A little bit of personal history:

When I was first learning to dance, my teacher tried to get me up and able to social dance quickly, including several smooth dances and several rhythm dances. That was totally and completely beyond my capacity, and I spent the better part of a year taking lessons, occasionally showing up to Friday night dances and stumbling through a song or two, but not feeling very good about it. And stepping on too many toes. I clicked in with dancing when a different teacher took me on and convinced me to enter the in-studio competition with an East Coast Swing “solo” piece (what I would now call an exhibition piece – she choreographed the dance to a specific song. We put on costumes and acted out a little scene as part of the dance – pretty close to what most of the performances on Dancing With the Stars are.

With that experience, I graduated to a comfort level with East Coast Swing that I could show up to a dance and dance that one style for the one in 10ish songs that the DJ played. But wait – there is some overlap between East Coast Swing tempo and Slow Foxtrot, at least for social dancing. And the music is of a similar style, since these dances “grew up together” in the Swing Era. And even better – the people dancing Foxtrot were following line of dance around the edge of the dance floor, so we could tear up the middle of the floor with a swing and not disturb the “official” dance. Now I could be up on the floor for one in 5ish songs, and things were starting to feel better. And the rest is history.

How can music4dance help?

But back to the topic at hand. There is a strong motivation when picking songs for a social dance where many styles are represented (which is often true in a traditional ballroom setting) to cater to music that lets newbies dance what they know.  Music4dance makes this easy. If you want to find songs that fall in the overlap between East Coast Swing and Slow Foxtrot, just go to the Advanced Search page and choose each of those dances in the Dances section and click on All (you want the intersection, not the union). Or click here. Then you might want to whittle down that list to the fast end of the Slow Foxtrot and the slow end of the East Coast range – say 128 to 132 BPM, and you get a manageable list of songs to browse through. You can listen to snippets of most songs directly in music4dance. Or, if you’re a premium subscriber, you can export the list to a Spotify playlist and listen to the full songs.

There are a lot of combinations of dances this technique works for, including the dances from the title of this post – West Coast Swing and Slow Foxtrot or Cha Cha and American Rumba are just a couple. Take it for a spin and let me know what you think. And let me know if you use this alongside other features. Or just drop me a line with how you use music4dance. I always read and respond to feedback.

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.

Create a Spotify Playlist

One of my initial goals with music4dance was to be able to create playlists to dance to.  I can finally say that I’ve got this working in a way that is close to my original vision at least for Spotify. The idea is, for instance, that I’d like to build a playlist of Foxtrot songs…

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New Feature: Filter by Song Length

If you’re trying to get a playlist together for a social dance, it would be nice for the songs to be a reasonable length for your audience.  I realize that DJ tools will let you manage this in multiple ways, but sometimes it’s just easier to start with songs in the length range you’d like. There are…

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Add to a Spotify Playlist Directly from music4dance

A number of people have told me over the years that they create custom Spotify playlists by browsing the music4dance catalog and selecting individual songs. I’ve had ambitions to do all kinds of things to create and manipulate playlists. But it occurred to me, based on a recent conversation, that just the ability to easily…

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Searching for Music

What if I want to find just Cha Chas tagged as American Style?

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Or one of the many variations, such as Slow Foxtrots labeled as “Traditional,” or Boleros labeled as “fast”?

Queries like the above have always been possible, but with a very major caveat. Up until now, you could search on Cha Cha dance and “American” style. But what that did was find all songs that had a net Cha Cha vote of at least one and a tag on any dance of “American” style. So if someone voted on a song as Rumba and tagged the Rumba as American, then someone else voted for the song as Cha Cha, searching on Cha Cha and American would include that song.

This behavior was particularly troublesome if you wanted to do something like search for fast Salsas, because you’d end up with songs that are fast Rumbas or Cha Chas, but slow Salsas, which is precisely what you don’t want. Side note: the workaround for that particular issue is to search on specific tempos, but that isn’t really the same as searching for songs that someone explicitly tagged as slow or fast for a particular dance, since there is more thought put into tagging (and not every song has a tempo associated with it).

I’ve done a bunch of restructuring and added more than a bit of UI to enable the kinds of searches that I’m describing here. I’m currently busy updating the documentation to catch up, but I hope that the fundamental change is relatively intuitive.

There have always been two kinds of tags: tags on songs and tags on top of a dance style for a song. I’m gravitating to calling the latter dance-specific tags, although I haven’t been 100% consistent yet. If you go to any of the dance details pages (try Slow Waltz), you’ll see two tag clouds now, labeled Dance Tags and Song Tags. Clicking on any of the tags in the Dance (specific) Tags section will give you the option to list the songs with that tag on Rumba.

Alternatively, you can navigate to the Advanced Search page, add Rumba to the list of dances, toggle the “Show Dance Details” switch, and select the option to include the American tag. In either case, you’ll end up with this result. Or we can answer the original question of All Cha Cha songs tagged as “American” style.

In any case, this is a very large new feature that includes a breaking schema change in the search index, so there are bound to be bugs. Please poke at it and let me know what you think. I’m doing my best to enable the deep scenarios that you ask for without overly complicating the core scenarios. Part of what I’m trying to do is what I alluded to in my last post, where I made a reference to making it easier to add refinements to dance searches, so that you can more accurately find all American Style Slow Foxtrots – once could theoretically do something similar with Country Cha Chas (which aren’t currently supported at all).

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.

New Feature: Searching on songs with a minimum number of dance votes

Several folks have been frustrated with the number of songs in the music4dance catalog that only have one or two votes for a particular dance style. This limitation doesn’t matter for many searches because you can sort by dance votes, and the most popular songs end up at the top. But if you want to…

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New Dance: Single Swing

I’ve added Single Swing as a dance style that can be searched on and voted for in the music4dance catalog. While I think of this dance as a short-cut to use when I want to dance East Coast Swing to faster Jive or Lindy-Hop music, I’ve received enough feedback from the community that it’s considered a unique dance in its own right that…

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“Search like Google” is now the default

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…

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Searching for Music

New Feature: Searching on songs with a minimum number of dance votes

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Several folks have been frustrated with the number of songs in the music4dance catalog that only have one or two votes for a particular dance style. This limitation doesn’t matter for many searches because you can sort by dance votes, and the most popular songs end up at the top.

But if you want to sort by something else, such as tempo or date modified, you’re out of luck. That is until now.

I’ve added a feature in advanced search that enhances the ability to filter by dance. Previously, you could filter only on whether a song had a net of at least one vote for a dance style. Now, you can filter on any threshold. So, if I want to create a list of all songs with at least three votes (net) between 160 and 180 beats per measure sorted by date added, I can do that now.

Here’s how:

  1. Go to Advanced Search
  2. Choose Salsa in the Dance filter
  3. Click on Show Thresholds
  4. Click on the “+” next to Salsa twice to increase the threshold to 3
  5. Change the tempo range to 160-180
  6. Choose “When Added” for the “Sort By” field
Advanced Search with Dance Thresholds
Advanced Search with Dance Thresholds example

Let me know what you think. Are there other ways you would use this kind of filter? Is there any reason to filter out the most voted for songs? That’s certainly possible, but I didn’t see a use case for that.

In addition to the specific ask above, I’m always happy to hear ideas about 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.

Searching for Music

How to find the most popular songs to dance to

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The core mission of music4dance.net is to help you find music to dance to, whether you’re a ballroom dancer, social dancer, or really any kind of dancer. Sometimes I look at the site and say, “This could be better.” Or “Here’s a place that I’ve wanted to improve for a while but couldn’t figure out how; maybe I should try something different.” I had an “aha” moment when I was going through the site for my annual Holiday Music post. I’ve been frustrated that many of the lists of songs on music4dance.net default to some nearly random order that tended to put songs on top that only one or two people had voted for. In the Holiday Music catalog, if you choose a specific dance (like Foxtrot), the list is sorted by the number of votes for that dance. But that wasn’t true of the main list, and there wasn’t an obvious way to sort that list by dance votes.

So I took a step back to think about the general problem of getting the songs with the most dance votes to the top of lists and search results and started digging into the corner cases, which is generally where I get stuck on this kind of problem. For song sorting, I was particularly worried about an issue that a customer brought up when I first implemented the general search like google feature that enabled full-text search. In that case, I was sorting by most recent by default, and when the customer tried to do a full-text search, the song he was looking for ended up on the second page of results because there were a bunch of songs that matched his search less well but had been added more recently.

After thinking about this for a while and looking through search history, I concluded that there are two main ways people search for songs to dance to on music4dance.net. The most common search is for a specific song or artist, in which case you want the song you’re searching for to end up as close to the top of the list as possible, whether or not it is highly rated. The other way is to build lists to browse or create playlists from. In these cases, having the most popular songs at the top makes sense (unless you’ve specified something else like tempo).

Given the above, I’m more explicitly handling the case where you don’t specify a sort order as a special “default” case. If you search for specific text, I assume that’s the most important part of your search, and I sort by most relevant to the text part of the search. This part should take care of the customer I  mentioned above and folks doing that kind of search. In all other cases, I’ll sort by dance votes. You can, of course, always use the Advanced Search page to specify a sort order to override the default.

One of the reasons that I didn’t do this a long time ago is that there are some other corner cases. The biggest one is that there is no way in the underlying search engine to sort on the sum of the votes for different dances. So I can sort on votes for Rumba or even votes on Rumba, then votes for Cha Cha, but I can’t sort by the sum of the votes for Rumba and Cha Cha or even on the most total votes. I still haven’t fully solved this problem, but I have reduced it to a corner case that I believe is a better compromise than the random sort I started with.

I added a new sortable field in the database representing the sum of all dance votes on each song. With the new field, when looking at the default song list you see when you go to the Song Library, you’ll see the most popular songs on the first page. That also helps pages like the main Holiday Dance Music page, where you’ll also see the most popular songs first. The dance-specific pages were already sorted by dance votes for the Holiday, Broadway, and Halloween pages but not for the main dance lists (e.g., East Coast Swing Songs). That’s now fixed.

Unfortunately, in cases where you search for multiple dance styles, I can’t sort by the sum of the votes of those styles. Instead, I sort by each dance style vote in the order you specified them. So, if you search for all songs with Rumba, Bolero, and Cha Cha votes, you’ll get a list starting with the songs with the most votes for Rumba, then Bolero, and finally by Cha Cha votes. It’s not a perfect solution, but I think it’s still an improvement over the previous random ordering in these cases. What do you think?

Following the line of reasoning that started this post, I’m sure there are things that aren’t quite working for many of you when searching on music4dance. Please let me know. Sometimes, I just need to see the problem to come up with a fix. That’s especially true if you’re using the site in a way I didn’t expect, so even if everything is working smoothly, I’d love to hear how it’s helping you.

In addition to the specific ask above, I’m always happy to hear ideas about 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.

Searching for Music

Partner Dance Songs in Broadway Musicals

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We recently attended a production of Peter Pan. This wasn’t a musical we would normally seek out, but it was part of a season that we subscribe to, so what the heck. Perhaps it was because expectations were low or more likely because of the Jerome Robbins choreography, but we quite enjoyed it.

Why am I telling you this? If you check out the cast recording (this is the  1989 recording, but it’s approximately the same songs as the 2024 production), you’ll see a couple of easily recognizable dance names in “Hook’s Tango” and “Captain Hook’s Waltz” and a couple of slightly less recognizable dances (at least to a ballroom dancer) in “Hook’s Tarantella” and “Pirate March.” There is obviously cross-pollination between dancing and music in Broadway musicals and the partner dancing and related music I catalog here. In fact, one of the friends who originally coaxed me into the ballroom dancing world started dancing when he performed in musicals.

That got me going down the path of what we currently have cataloged in the cross-section between musical theatre and partner dance music. I went to the tag cloud page and looked for relevant tags. There were several, which is a mixed blessing and also pretty common in this system where I’m pulling data from various places, including crowd-sourcing. The most relevant tags I found were “Broadway” (30 songs), “Show Tunes” (43 songs), “Musicals” (36 songs), and “Broadway and Vocal” (98 songs). This got me into the same kind of situation as when  I first looked at holiday music where I wanted to do a search that the system doesn’t allow. But like the holiday music issue, this is a limitation of the interface I built rather than the underlying database, so it’s easy enough to further generalize the code I wrote for holiday music and Halloween music and land on an excellent solution for Broadway music.

Broadway soundtracks are a rich source of fun songs to dance to, but even with this custom search, I don’t think the existing music4dance database does it justice. What songs from musicals inspire you to dance? Do the actors dance a recognizable version of the dance on stage, or do the songs just work for the dance style? I’d love to see more songs from Broadway in the catalog. Please feel free to contact me if you have lists in any form, and I’ll incorporate them. Or even better, feel free to add them yourself if you have some favorites.

Also, please let me know if you have ideas for searches that you can’t make work with the existing system. I am considering generalizing the search in a couple of different ways, and ideas from you will help me pick a direction. I am also considering adding a “fun searches” page to share some of the searches you can do with the current system, but it might not be easily discoverable. Send me your favorite fun searches, and if I get enough, I’ll increase the priority of that feature.

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.

Searching for Music

I’m a ballroom dancer. Can I find practice songs that are at competition tempo? (Revisited)

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This is an update to a post I wrote in 2015. Music4Dance has come a long way since then, so the answer to the title question is completely different than it was nearly a decade ago.  In fact, the top-level answer is so simple I was tempted to just put a note at the top of the old post, but I had a few other things to say, so I went this route instead.

So here it is: Go to the Ballroom page and check it out.  The page is accessible from the “Music” menu.

A table showing the tempi of American Smooth dances

Clicking on the round title takes you to a page with more information about that style.  For the American styles, that includes other dances that aren’t part of a round.

The Competition Ballroom page has sections for American Smooth, American Rhythm, International Standard, and International Latin. Each section contains basic information about the dances, including tempo in measures per minute and beats per minute1 for both of the major organizations that run Ballroom Dance Competitions.

Clicking on any tempo listings will take you to a list of songs tagged with that dance style and set to within that tempo range.  Note that I’m not currently also filtering on the American or International tag on the dance. This is for two reasons. First, the underlying database, which has a lot of excellent qualities, won’t let me do that particular search.  Second, because many of my sources don’t routinely specify the style, we’d be leaving out many great songs if we filtered that tightly.

And that’s it!

Here are some additional things that you might want to try that are adjacent to the simple answer:

If you disagree with the tempo listings and believe they’re wrong, please let me know, and if possible, cite your sources.  Tempo recommendations change occasionally, and I’m not always on top of the changes – the NDCA made some substantial changes a couple of years ago, and it took me over a year to notice.

If you want to find songs that are slower or faster than the listed tempos (e.g., if you want a slow set and a fast set), you can go through the process above and then click “change search” on the results. This will take you to the advanced search page, where you can change the tempo range without changing anything else and re-run the search.

If you have a premium subscription you can export the results of any of the above searches to Spotify.

If you would like to have this kind of support for other styles of dance, let me know where I can find reliable tempo information, and I’ll look into adding them. Some similar functionality is available on all of the dances we list, but the full tables only make sense if we have the kind of information that the ballroom dance organizations give for their competitions.

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.

  1. Before you ask, I’m leading with “Measures Per Minute” rather than “Beats Per Minute,” as that’s how NDCA and DanceSport list tempo in their rules. If anyone in the ballroom world knows why that is, please let me know. ↩︎
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?

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…

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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…

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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.

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What are your favorite Prince songs for partner dancing?

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…

msc4dnc's avatar 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…

msc4dnc's avatar 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. ↩︎
Searching for Music

New Dance: Single Swing

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I’ve added Single Swing as a dance style that can be searched on and voted for in the music4dance catalog. While I think of this dance as a short-cut to use when I want to dance East Coast Swing to faster Jive or Lindy-Hop music, I’ve received enough feedback from the community that it’s considered a unique dance in its own right that I am happy to add it. From some light searching on this dance, it has gone by several names in different regions and times. Some of the names I saw were “Sing-time Swing,” “Single rhythm swing,” and “East Coast Single Swing.” It’s also one of several dances that have been called the Jitterbug at some point in the twentieth century.

I set the initial tempo to 140-184 beats per minute (35-46 measures per minute), which I found listed in several places. Since, as far as I can tell, this isn’t a competition dance, I haven’t found an “official” tempo range and am happy to adjust if someone with more expertise in this particular dance would provide feedback. I also seeded this list of songs with publicly available lists that sounded reasonable. Please feel free to go through to vote up other swing songs that you think are good fits for this dance. You can do this by adding songs or by searching for Swing songs in the Single Swing tempo range and voting up the ones that sound like good Single Swings. I’m also happy to bulk upload lists if you’ve got a CSV file or Spotify playlist of single swings that you’d like me to include.

Over the past several years, I’ve been moving the site in a direction where I hope to be able to handle more different dance styles and add them more easily. I’m getting closer to being able to add dances quickly. However, to add a lot of different dances, I’ll have to replace the underlying search engine (or wait for it to add some new features – it will be interesting to see which comes first). Some of the things I’ve done are to make lists of dances somewhat flatter and allowing search by name in most places where dances are listed. I’ve loosened the tie between types of dances (e.g., Sing, Waltz, Latin) and dance style, so that dance styles don’t have to be as strictly categorized as before. I’ve also added synonyms to dance styles, so in most places where you see the name of a dance style, other names of the dance are shown in parenthesis.

In any case, I’m always interested in what you think would be most helpful. I’m sure there are plenty of dance styles I’m not cataloging that fit into the broad category of partner dances that are danced to a specific tempo range or style of music. If you have a dance style suggestion or other comments, please feel free to reply to this post or contact me here. In addition, if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider helping by adding to the Single Swing catalog or contributing in whatever other way makes sense for you.

Searching for Music

New Feature: Searching for only the songs that someone has voted for

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Arne pointed out the other day that it would be useful to be able to build a playlist for just the songs that he had voted for dancing Cha Cha. I scratched my head a bit because I thought this was already possible. I even added a feature last year to make it easier to see who has voted on dance styles for songs so that you could look for other songs that a user voted on.

I should have noticed that you can search for a dance and that someone has tagged it in some way. But you can’t specify that someone has voted for a particular dance. They might have voted against the dance or just tagged the song with another kind of tag, and someone else voted for the song, so it still shows up in the search.

This wasn’t too bad when the catalog was relatively small and when you’re just looking at search results to find ideas for songs to dance to. 

However, things have gotten worse over time for a couple of reasons.

In Arne’s case, he wanted to export a playlist to Spotify of songs that he explicitly voted for Cha Cha. Using advanced search, he can choose Cha Cha then search “By User” and “Include all songs arne has tagged.” This search resulted in 50 songs, only 26 of which he had voted for Cha Cha. On that list were songs that he had explicitly voted against and a number that he had just voted for other dances.

The new feature is to add an option to the “By User” section of advanced search to “Include all songs [user] has voted for [dance].” In this case, choosing “Include all songs arne has voted for Cha Cha” yields the correct 26 songs he voted for.

The other case this feature solves is that as the catalog grows, there is more variety in how people vote on songs, so there is more noise. For instance, searching for the songs that DWTS (Dancing With the Stars) has tagged that someone has also voted for Cha Cha results in 305 songs, while searching specifically for the songs that DWTS has voted for Cha Cha results in only 130 songs.

Thanks, Arne, for pointing this out and helping to make music4dance more useful for everyone.

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. The DWTS list is a list I maintain, and any mistakes in are mine. I use a semi-automated method of scraping the published information about the dances each week to populate the information in muic4dance. DWTS, in particular, is challenging because the music they dance to is generally covers performed by their house bands, so they don’t always match the tempo of the available recordings. Please let me know about any mistakes you see.