Ask music4dance: Should you add a Single Swing Dance category?

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Arne had another great question (paraphrased): I see Single Swing being danced a lot these days.  Should music4dance add another swing category? Is Single Swing a local thing, national, really new? Do people still dance triple-step Swing?

Here is a slightly cleaned-up version of my response:

East Coast Swing (the triple step variety) is a competition dance, so it’s still being danced regularly in ballroom environments. But the Lindy revival of the ’90s seems to have dominated the social swing scene from what I can tell.

In the ballroom community that I learned to dance in during the ’90s, they used the term East Coast Swing to refer to the competition dance, which was definitely a triple-swing. But if one was dancing socially to music too fast to comfortable dance triple swing, you would revert to something they were calling Single Swing or East Coast Single Swing or some variation on that.

I fell down a rabbit hole, trying to see if my recollection had anything to do with current thinking on this. This video shows a “Single Swing” basic that is exactly what I think of as Single Swing. Duet Dance and DanceTime both have descriptions of various kinds of swings. They seem to agree that what I think of as Single Swing could also be reasonably called “The Jitterbug” (which I had thought was just a different name for Lindy Hop). As with any of this stuff, the history is so twisted up that there probably isn’t a correct answer, or if there is, it would require a historian to dig up.

Even without adding a new dance, you should be able to find some good ideas for Single Swings by searching for generic Swing in the tempo range between 140 and 184 MPM. When I first responded to Arne, I had broken that feature, but it’s now up and running again. So you can go to the Advanced Search Page, choose Swing in the dances section, and type in the tempo range you’d like to filter on. 

I am interested in incorporating Single Swing into the music4dance catalog. Should I do this as Jitterbug or Single Swing or by adding single and triple tags to East Coast Swing? I’d love to get others’ thoughts on this so please feel free to send feedback.

Asking to add a new dance style to the catalog is certainly in the top ten questions I’ve been getting. So I’ve been working on streamlining how I manage dance information to make that easier. Most of this work has been under the hood (although the bug mentioned above was one side effect). One of the more visible aspects of this is a small redesign of the Dance Styles page to simplify it a bit and hopefully make it a little more usable.

As always, I’m very interested in your feedback, so please share any thoughts and ideas you have 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 that makes sense for you.

New Feature: General Search

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I’ve finally added a feature that should really be a part of any good website. A general search of the entire site is available by typing one or more keywords in the search box in the upper right and clicking search. Try it out, and let me know what you think.

As I continue to improve music4dance, I find myself torn between making things easier for new or casual members of the site and deeper features that may only be used by more dedicated members. I tend to lean towards the latter because they are often the features that I use or the features based on feedback from members who have been using the site a lot. But I would love to get more people involved, which means making the initial experience as seamless as possible.

Search is pretty much the core feature of this site. The idea is, after all, to try to help partner dancers find music that inspires them to dance. I’ve invested a lot in the search engine that lets you search for songs and made a big push to make the core search work better. But in the meantime, I’ve written many blogs posts, some help pages, and added other content to the site that isn’t directly embedded in the song catalog.

So how do you search for any of the other information? And for that matter, if you’re a first-time user of the site, shouldn’t you be able to search the whole site easily without clicking through to a search page from the home page?

Some technical issues made this a bit more challenging than it would appear. Not the least of which is that the blog and help system are actually an entirely different site using a different technology that I have less control over. But after going down a few different paths, I think I’ve got something that I’m happy with. It could still use some work, and a couple of things about it feel a little kludgy. But I feel like it’s a significant improvement, especially for a first-time user. It also enables a full-text search of the core site, which will let me invest more in content that isn’t directly part of the song catalog. I’ve got a bunch of things I’ve been thinking about along those lines that I haven’t implemented because I was worried they’d be buried without a generalized search.

So as I mentioned at the beginning of this post. You should be able to just type a keyword or two into the search control in the header (or under the hamburger menu if you’re on a smaller device), and you’ll be taken to a search results page. That page is a little more complicated than I’d like but hopefully pretty effective.

As always, I’m very interested in your feedback, so please share any thoughts and ideas you have 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 that makes sense for you.

New Feature: Searching for a song from Spotify or iTunes

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A new member of the music4dance community, Arne, pointed out that he expected to be able to search by Spotify Id. Furthermore, he figured out how to do that by going to the Add Song by Id and dragging the song from Spotify into the edit field on that page.

This is a case of programmer myopia on my part. I wrote all of the code to look up a song in the Spotify and iTunes catalog with the idea of (a) being able to link back to those catalogs and then (b) to make it easier to add songs to the music4dance catalog. I didn’t really think that someone would want to look for a song they were playing in Spotify or Apple Music in the music4dance catalog. Actually – I did, but the way I was thinking about that was a much bigger feature that I may never get around to implementing.

What clicked in my slow programmer brain when I saw Arne’s question was that I had most of the code for a really cool feature but hadn’t seen the opportunity to implement it since I had this much more grandiose feature in my head. After the obligatory forehead slap and exclamation of “Duh!” I set about seeing how easy it would be to use what I had already written to implement a reasonably smooth version of what our Arne was doing.

It was definitely straightforward – a bit of refactoring and a few dozen lines of new code, and I’ve got something that I think is pretty slick. But I’ll let you judge:

When listening to a song in Spotify or  Apple Music, drag the song from the player and drop it into the text box on the top of either the Song Library page or the Advanced Search page. If the song is in the music4dance catalog, we’ll take you directly to the song page and show you what others have voted on to dance to that song. If it’s not already in the library, we’ll give you the option to add the song yourself.

As always, I’m very interested in your feedback. As should be obvious from this post, your feedback is essential to making music4dance better. In addition, I read every piece of feedback that comes through and respond to as much as I can. So please share any thoughts and ideas you have 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 that makes sense for you.

Valentine’s Day Edition: Love Songs that We Love to Dance to

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I’ve been making an effort to tag songs and write sophisticated searches to find good songs for holiday dances. The music4dance catalog is set up for this kind of search. Not only that, but I’ve always really enjoyed doing exhibition pieces for holiday parties.

I started with the Christmas/Winter holidays and added Halloween more recently. I hadn’t really thought about Valentine’s Day. But when I did (a little late for this year, but never too early to be planning for next year), I realized that I already had something pretty useful: What better place to look for love songs than a wedding music catalog. Which, coincidently, I’ve spent some time building up.

So if you’re looking for love songs to dance to, check out the Wedding Dance page and let me know what you think. This time of year, there are plenty of generic lists of Love Songs, so if I get some feedback that you’d like a more general list of danceable love songs, I can do some cross-indexing with one or more of those lists. And of course, you can always start adding songs and/or tagging existing songs with a “Love Song” tag and create your own lists.

As always, I’m very interested in your feedback, so please share any thoughts and ideas you have 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 that makes sense for you.

Ask music4dance: Why am I listed as Anonymous?

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A few months ago I started working on a set of features with the goal of making music4dance more personalized.  This includes the ability to add new songs to the catalog, to see who else likes to dance specific styles to a song, and more. As I was working on this I realized that almost all members of the music4dance community have chosen the privacy setting to not share their profile. This was the default setting, so it shouldn’t have come as a surprise.  While the features that I’ve written so far don’t even give one the ability to write a profile, I want to be as respectful as possible with everyone’s privacy and not show user names anywhere for members who had opted for privacy.  This is especially true because many members have chosen to use what appears to be their full name as their user name.

So I did some work to make sure that anyone who had chosen that setting is protected by not showing their name, and instead I use the single “Anonymous” moniker.  I’m still tracking who those users are by means of a randomly generated number, but other visitors to the site will only see the user as “Anonymous”.  That is even the case if you send a link to your songs to a friend.  For instance, I’ve marked my test user “Charlie” as not wanting to share his profile, so if I’m logged on as Charlie and look at a list of Charlie’s songs then the list and changes to the songs are attributed to Charlie.  But if I send that link to you, you’ll just see his changes attributed to Anonymous.

A search of all the songs “Charlie” has edited as Charlie sees it
The same list that is shown above as seen by anyone but Charlie

This isn’t the best user experience in my opinion.  I had some thought of having permanent anonymous names so that Charlie might be anonymous1 and you might be anonymous2, but that was a considerable amount of extra work for a pretty marginal improvement. 

What does that mean to you? If you’ve spent time voting on songs in the music4dance catalog, please consider turning the privacy feature off to allow sharing.  You can do that from the My Profile page. All changing that setting will currently do is show your user name in searches and attribute changes that you’ve made to a song to your user name.  If you happened to use your real name as your user name and would like to change it to something else, just contact me and I can make that change (if enough people want to do that, I’ll add a self-service feature).

I’m very interested in making this site a useful place to share ideas for songs to dance to and I believe part of that experience is being able to attribute changes to specific users. But it doesn’t matter too much right now if those users are connected to the real person that’s making those changes (more on that later). So please take the time to make it easier for other dancers to follow your work by changing that setting.

As always, I’m very interested in your feedback so please share any thoughts and ideas you have 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 that makes sense for you.

Dance as Language

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I was delighted to find that the folks at the Rough Translation podcast produced an episode called May We Have This Dance?  For those who haven’t heard of it, Rough Translation describes itself as “a podcast about cultural mistranslation and what we can learn from them.”

In this episode, they explore the Lindy Hop and its odd evolution from a dance created by African Americans in 1920s Harlem to its revival when it was adopted by the Scandinavians (and others) in the 1990s.  Not being from either culture, I don’t feel equipped to talk about the core of the cultural issues addressed in the podcast and accompanying article.  But I would recommend both Frankie Manning: Ambassador of Lindy Hop and Stompin’ at the Savoy if the podcast piques your interest in the origins of the whole swing family of dances.  In addition, I haven’t read Swingin’ the Savoy yet but it is definitely going into my queue.

I will say that I particularly liked the discussion at about 30 minutes into the podcast about when LaTasha and Felix clicked as dance partners and dance became like a conversation.  I feel like the best of my social partner dancing has felt like speaking a language that’s more expressive than English.

Definitely check out the reference material they have at the end – if you haven’t seen the Lindy Hop sequence from Hellzapoppin, you’re in for a real treat and the clip of LaTasha and Felix was lots of fun as well.

Finally – they provided a list of LaTasha’s favorite music to dance to which I added to the music4dance catalog and then exported as a Spotify playlist.

As always, I’m happy for feedback and if you enjoy the site or the blog, please consider contributing in whatever way that makes sense for you.

New Feature: More ways to see what’s going on at music4dance

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One of my goals for music4dance is to build a system that people can use to share their knowledge of partner dance music with others.  I probably spent too much time early on in this project building bots and scrapers to seed the catalog with content and neglected the community aspect of the site.  So I am now trying to focus on more community-building features.  This includes everything from simplifying the system so that it’s easier to add new styles of dance to making it easier for members to add new songs to making it possible for members to see who else likes to dance to a song.

Following on to the feature where I added the ability to see the voting history on a song on the details page, I’ve added a couple of small feature-lets.

Now,  when you filter music on a user you will see a column  with that user’s changes:

If you know a user’s username, you can filter by a user in the advanced search page by typing the username and choosing what you want to filter on (likes, tags, etc.).  Or you can go down the path described in a previous post and click on a username anywhere that one shows up.  That will take you to a page that will let you filter on all the songs that the user has tagged or all the songs that that user has added to favorites among other things. Eventually, I’d like to have that page contain additional user profile information.

The other fun thing you can do is on the new music page.  The song list on that page has a similar column to the one above that shows latest change to each song and who made it.  That’s a way to find users that are actively adding songs and seeing what they’re up to.

And finally, when you’re exploring these features if you find a search that you want to share with others, you can just copy the URL and send it to a friend. That’s what I do with links back to the music4dance site with these blogs – so it’s not a new feature, but it is becoming more useful with the other community features that I’m building.

As always, I welcome feedback on not just the feature, but the site in general.  And if you find the site useful, please consider contributing in any way that you can.

Holiday Music for Partner Dancing 2021

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It’s the time of year again to talk about Holiday Music.

This year, I haven’t done any new work on the Holiday Music page other than keeping it up to date with the rest of the site.  But I have continued to add songs.  As of this writing, there are 667 songs in the holiday catalog, up from 517 songs last year. And, yes, there were 666 songs before I started writing this post – it seemed inappropriate to have that number of the holiday catalog so I dug up one more song to get to 667.

Check out the current Holiday Music Catalog here.

If you are interested in helping build the catalog further, here are some things you could do:

  • Browse our music catalog and tag songs as Holiday when you find them.
  • If you have a list of holiday songs categorized by dance style that you are willing to share, please send me an email at info@music4dance.net or contact me through the feedback form.
  • In addition, general contributions will help the holiday music catalog and other efforts.

As always if you have comments or suggestions please feel free to reply to this post or contact me here. Please consider helping with the music4dance project either by helping with the Holiday Music catalog as mentioned above or any of the other ways listed on the “Contribute” page.

Sorry about that nasty bug

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I introduced a bug in the last update of music4dance and then went on vacation.  This is a pretty classic software engineering blunder and I’m very sorry for the trouble it caused.  The good news is a bunch of people noticed it and cared enough to report it. Thanks, everyone for that and I’ll be sending you your bug bounty shorty!  The bad news is that I had another series of other issues that meant that I didn’t actually see the feedback until I found the bug myself.

In any case, the bug is now fixed and things should be back in working order.  The reason that I didn’t notice the bug as I was testing is that I was working on a feature to help show member activity on songs to improve the feature I talked about in a previous post and the bug cropped up for people that aren’t logged in which I failed to check with the very last change.

It’s entirely possible to set up a system where automated testing would catch this level of bug.  And I certainly have that kind of testing in place for the sites that I build in my day job.  But that kind of testing costs both in my time and dollars for infrastructure.  Since music4dance isn’t even a break-even proposition without adding more infrastructure, I will probably leave that level of testing on the back-burner for a while.  The good news is that I checked and the last time I had this level of an issue with the site was well over two years ago.

Speaking of the finances behind music4dance, I will take this opportunity to note that if you find the site useful I’d really appreciate your support.  While financial support is always welcome, I know everyone is not in the position to provide that so there are plenty of other ways to help the project. I’ve listed a bunch of them on the Contribute page.  Please check it out and do what you can.

Again, I’m very sorry for the inconvenience that this bug caused and wish everyone the best dancing during the upcoming holiday season.

What is the difference between adding a song to Favorites and voting on a  Song’s Danceability?

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From discussions with dancers navigating the music4dance site and observing people’s usage of the site I realize that I still haven’t made it easy to understand the nuances of a couple of important features.  I’m trying to default to simplifying the site wherever possible. But enough people are using both of these features that I don’t feel good about getting rid of either of them.  So I made some changes in terminology and behavior and I’m interested to know if this makes more sense.

Here are the two features at issue:

  1. The concept of voting on the danceability of a song to a particular dance style.  For instance – I love dancing Cha Cha to “Let’s Get Loud” by Jennifer Lopez, so I’ll vote on that.
  2. The concept of adding songs to a favorites or blocked list.  Up until this change I labelled the favorites/blocked list as like/dislike, which I now believe is part of the source of confusion.

It’s important to the music4dance community that people vote on the danceability of a song to dance styles – this is what helps build and refine the catalog that is the core of the site and the main reason that people visit it.

It’s also useful to be able to add songs to a favorites list so that you can filter on that for future searches.   And frankly, blocking a song that you are just sick of is kind of nice as well.

The two concepts are almost completely separate in how they would be used.  But they are too easily confused.  I hope that moving from the like/dislike nomenclature to favorites/blocked list will make things less confusing.

Since I feel the voting concept is more useful to the community, I’ve also done some things to make that more discoverable.  The most recent of these is that when you click on the heart (add to favorites) button in the main song lists, rather than just toggling through favorites/blocked/neutral, it will bring up a modal that will let you explicitly choose one of those options as well as quickly vote on any of the dance styles already associated with the song.

I’ve also added a voting button to dance info modal that is available by clicking on the dance voting results button.

As I noted at the beginning, this is something that I’ve been struggling with for some time (check out this post from 2016) and hope I’ve improved it a bit.  But I’m sure there are other things I can do to make this better, so please send me any of your ideas and let me know if you think the latest change works better (or worse) for you.

And, as always, I’m open to feedback about the feature discussed here as well as the site overall.

Music4dance could use your help:  Please take a look the contribute page:  This lists a bunch of ways to contribute from purchasing premium memberships to voting on songs to sharing with your friends and a bunch of things in between.

Shall we dance…to music?

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