Tag Archives: American Rhythm

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. ↩︎
Music and Dance

Playing with Dance Tempos

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I just rewrote the Tempo tool for the music4dance site as part of the current effort to update the site.  In the process I went back and revisited the reasons for writing the tool in the first place. 

The main reason for this tool is to have a single place to do a bit of slicing and dicing of the relationship between the tempo of different partner dances.  It allows one to filter on the dances that you’re interested in (all Swing dances, or American Style dances) and sort by tempo to see the relationships.    This could, for instance, help find dances that one might mash up into an exhibition routine.

Another reason is just because I could.  The Tempo tool is really just a thin layer on top of the data that I use to drive the Counter tool and many other parts of the site.  I almost didn’t rewrite the tool because since I originally wrote it I added slightly less interactive but possibly more directly useful pages that lay out the different competition dances and their tempos in what I hope is an easily digestible way.

This is part of a larger rewrite of the site that I’ve been working on to get the code to a place where I can comfortably start adding more requested features.  The Counter and Tempo tools are a couple of the most isolated pages, but I’ll start digging into more core functionality soon.

As always, please send me feedback if you have ideas about the site, dancing, music, or how any or all of those subjects relate. And please consider supporting the music4dance project by sharing with your friends or any of the other ways listed here.

Quick Tip:  Many pages (like the ones mentioned above) have documentation pages that are easily accessible from the page.  Just go to the “Info” menu and choose “Help”, this will generally take you to a documentation page specifically about the feature that you were using.

Archive

I’m a competition ballroom dancer, can I find practice songs that are a specific tempo?

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Update (May 2024): Music4dance has evolved enough that this post is stale. Please check out the updated version of this post for current information.

The quick answer to this question is yes, definitely!

First, many of the songs in our catalog have been tagged with a tempo, so it is easy to get a list of suggestions.  However, these are tempi that have been sourced from all over the web, so please use this as a first approximation rather than some kind of official source.

That said, it’s very easy to get  a list of songs of a particular tempo.  Just go to the song list page (the “Songs” item in the “Music” menu), choose the style of dance you’re interested in practicing [A] and click on the “More” button [B].

dance-selector-annotated

Then you can fill the minimum tempo (C) an the maximum temp (D), and click the search button (E) to get a list of songs.

tempo-filter-annotated

If the list is empty we haven’t tagged any songs in that tempo range for that dance style.  Which is the perfect segue into the another way to do this kind of search.

If you are competing in a particular category (International Standard, International Latin, American Smooth and American Rhythm), you can go to the info page for that category by  clicking on the name of the category on the  Ballroom Dancer section of the home page or at the bottom of the dance style page.  The core of each of these pages is a table with the dances styles for that competition category and the competition tempo ranges.  The tempo ranges are active links to just the kind of song search that I described in the last paragraph.  Starting here will assure that you’ve started with the approved competition tempo range. Full documentation for the dance category pages can be found here.

Finally, if you are practicing a particular dance you can start from the dance style page (from the “Dances” item in the “Music” menu) and click on the dance style that you’re practicing.  The tempo info link on that page will take you to the same table as the category page but with just the single dance style specified.  Full documentation for the dance style pages can be found here.

Hope that helps.  If you are interested in helping refine our catalog (by, for instance, adding ‘strict’ tags) please sign up for our upcoming beta via this feedback form, or use the same form to report incorrect tempi or other information in our database.