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 note as a beat. Quarter note vs. eight note is another common variation. At one point, I tried to tag dances as half-time or double-time when I saw songs with this property. But honestly, I can tie my head up in knots when I look back at this. Am I dancing double-time to the music (e.g., stepping twice as fast), or is the music half-time to my dance? And, that ‘solution’ also has the limitation that there is no way to sort or filter on tempo and include those songs correctly without doing two searches (maybe 3) and then weaving the results together ‘manually.’
And that doesn’t even take into account Waltzes, where you can get into other fun variations that I talked about in my fake waltz post.
A more robust solution to this problem is to have a separate tempo field for each dance. This would only be filled in if the dance had a positive number of votes. Then, if you search on Foxtrot and sort by tempo, the Foxtrot tempo field will be used. If you search on multiple dances or didn’t include a dance in a search and sort on tempo, I’d have to default to some master tempo field. If I went down this path, I’d have to populate the ‘dance’ tempo fields off of the master tempo fields by default and do some manual searching for the exceptions (and depend on others to update them as they see them).
What do you think? Would this be a significant improvement in how you use music4dance? Or is it a corner-enough case that you’ve never noticed and would prefer I spend my time on improvements in other areas?
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.
In any case, I should ask this question at least once a year: What do you like about music4dance, and how do you use the site?
As I rework the code, I don’t always keep everything exactly the same, and as a solo project owner, I feel that I have license to cut features if it’s not apparent that customers heavily use them. I am able to get an idea of how folks use the site through analytics, but these tools often lose essential nuances. So, please let me know what is most important to you about the site so that I don’t accidentally cut it!
On a similar note, what are features that almost but don’t quite do what you want them to do? Or features that work but take more effort than they should? These ideas are easiest for me to incorporate as I’m doing a major rewrite, but feel free to let me know about them at any time.
Unlike my previous rewrite, this project involves “just” upgrading to new versions of front-end libraries rather than changing to a new framework, so there should be less of an impact on the site. It would also be faster, except that one of the libraries I depend on requires some help, so I’m diving into the next level of infrastructure, which is fun but time-consuming.
I value your thoughts and ideas. Please share them by commenting below or using other feedback mechanisms listed here. If you want to explore more ways to participate in the musci4dance community, please check out this page. Your contributions are highly appreciated, and your engagement is what makes this community thrive. Thank you.
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.
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 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 yourfeedback, 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.
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. ↩︎
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 yourfeedback, 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.
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…
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…
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.
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.”
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.
I’ve seen a number of questions recently about why information on the site is wrong. So I’ll start with one of the easier ones, which I’ve seen a number of variations on but is basically, “why is the tempo wrong”. Here’s the specific question that prompted me to write this post: There are a lot…
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…
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…
Christmas and other holiday dances are just around the corner, so it’s time to take another look at music ideas to partner dance to. I haven’t made any major changes to the Holiday Dance Pages this year, but there is plenty of new music to browse. Last year, we were at 667 songs, and I was hoping to break 1000 for this year. Which we did. As of this writing, music4dance has 1536 songs cataloged that are tagged as both Holiday and have some kind of partner dance associated with them.
Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this effort!
This Holiday season, I am trying something new. I’ve partnered with James Joseph to offer a special holiday promotion. From now until the end of the year, if you support music4dance by subscribing at the Bronze ($25) level or donating $25, you’ll receive an electronic copy of Jim’s book Hear the Beat, Feal the Music. This is a great resource for dancers working on improving their musicality (see my full review here), and I’m grateful to Jim for providing this opportunity for the music4dance community.
If you aren’t in a position to provide financial support for this project, there are plenty of other ways to contribute. Specifically, to help build the Holiday Music catalog, you can:
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 email me at info@music4dance.net or contact me through the feedback form.
As always, if you have comments or suggestions, please reply to this post or contact me here. Please consider helping with the music4dance project either by helping with the Holiday Music catalog mentioned above or any other ways listed on the “Contribute” page.
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 yourfeedback 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.
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…
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…
Okay, so that’s a slight rephrasing of the question from my previous post. But it sticks to the spirit of the idea. As a dancer learning a specific new dance, be it Cha Cha, Paso Doble or Waltz, where can I find music? So how do I do that? Dance generally co-evolves with music, so…
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. ↩︎
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. ↩︎
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.
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 yourfeedback, 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.
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…
As anyone who has spent any time reading my blog or interacting with my website should know by now, I’m very passionate about music, dance and the relationship between the two. I’m also very analytical about those subjects. And, yes, I believe passion and analysis can co-exist, don’t you? The fatal flaw with my perspective…
Whether you’re a DJ getting your playlist together or a performer looking for that perfect song to craft a routine to, our Halloween collection is a great place to start. I’ve recently spent some time expanding the catalog. As of this writing, there are 222 songs tagged as Halloween with at least one vote for some kind of partner dance like Foxtrot, Cha-Cha, or Salsa.
Several years ago, I made an initial pass at taking generic Halloween playlists and cross-referencing them with the music4dance catalog of songs tagged by dance style. At the time, I did the simplest possible thing: I imported the songs from some Halloween catalogs and then put a link in the songs menu that went to that query. At the time, 80 songs were tagged as Halloween and associated with a dance.
This seemed fine at the time, but recently, I noticed folks searching on the keyword “Halloween.” What does that get someone beyond the songs I had explicitly imported a while ago? One of the side-effects of the system is that I link as many albums that a song has been released on as I can. This means that if a song lands on “Halloween Hits” or something like it, searching by the Halloween keyword will find it even though no one in the music4dance universe tagged it as such.
So, over the last few days, I spent some time reviewing that list and adding an explicit “Halloween” tag where I felt it was appropriate. For the most part, if the song was included on a Halloween Party album, I included it. But I didn’t include songs that were merely on an album because they were used in a horror movie. Some songs will still appear in a search for Halloween that aren’t in the explicit Halloween catalog. If you find one that would make sense to include in a Halloween dance, please tag it.
As I mentioned earlier, between the general evolution of the music4dance catalog and my current efforts, there are, as of this writing, 222 songs that are tagged as Halloween and also have at least one dance vote.
That starts to get interesting and motivated me to generalize the code I wrote a while back for Christmas/Winter holiday music to create a dedicated Halloween page. That’s where you’ll land if you choose Music -> Halloween from the main menu. And that gives an easy route to finding all the Halloween songs to dance a Single Swing to (for instance). You could have done that with the old system, but folks don’t always find the advanced search; this makes things a little easier. In addition, this gave me a smooth path to exporting the results to Spotify. Now, each Halloween Dance page has a Spotify widget with the playlist, and you can go to the music4dance Spotify account and browse the Halloween Playlists. While you’re there, please like the playlist and the music4dance account, which helps spread the word.
As always, I’m very interested in yourfeedback, 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.
When I started the music4dance blog nearly a decade ago, I considered including a technical component by writing about the challenges of building and maintaining the site. A good friend talked me out of doing that, and I still think it’s the right decision. I’m assuming most of the audience for this blog isn’t particularly interested in what I’ve done to build the site. You’re interested in what you can do with the site, learning more about the relationship between music and partner dancing, and how to find music to dance to. If I’m wrong about you, please let me know; if I get more than a few direct responses, I’ll set up a poll and consider a pivot based on the results.
I am disappointed I never got around to spinning up a technical blog. I’ve learned much over the years while building and maintaining this site. And I generally feel the need to share when solving technical problems. Now that I’m not leading a team of engineers, I’ve given up my primary outlet. So, it finally tipped the balance, and I’ve started some technical writing.
I decided to use medium.com to host my technical writing. That removed the barrier to entry of setting up another site and spinning on what technology to use, and I’ve been happy with the platform. The first series of posts is only tangentially music4dance related but is still motivated by this project. I use a simplified version of the tempo counter applet from the website to compare the experience of writing that app on several multi-platform frameworks. In addition, I took the opportunity to write about my experience in helping build the foundation for Microsoft’s version of that solution. So, if you have a technical bent, please take a look – the first post is “Which Multi-platform framework should I use to write my app?” And if you like it, please do the things that help spread the word. With medium, those things are to clap, follow, and share the link with friends.
As always, I’m very interested in yourfeedback 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.
music4dance 