Pacific Northwest Ballet included Twila Tharp’sNine Sinatra Songs as part of their Director’s Choice performance this year. I’m not in any way qualified to review a Ballet performance, but I can say that I thoroughly enjoyed it and had a great time playing with the Ballroom-inspired aspects of the dancing as I watched the show unfold. For me, the idea that the dancing was inspired by ballroom rather than in any way attempting to choreograph actual ballroom dance steps on ballet dancers is what made it work (this is the issue I sometimes have with partner dance in Broadway musicals). It was obvious in several of the nine pieces that Ballroom dance inspired the piece, and the upper body shaping and movements felt quite ballroomesque throughout the performance.
On returning home, I hoped to find a resource that listed the dances that Tharp drew from for each of the first eight pieces (the ninth is a reprise group number), but I failed. The notes from some of the performances mention the roots of one or two dances, but it seems like, for the most part, they name the same couple of songs. So, my guess is that even a thorough search of those through the years wouldn’t yield a complete list. As an aside, it was fun to jump down the rabbit hole of the French Apache Dance that Tharp drew from for the choreography for That’s Life. If someone has such a reference, please let me know.
In the meantime, I will take this as inspiration to play a little with the possibilities of music and dance. Sinatra is already well represented in the music4dance catalog, with 166 songs listed before I started filling out the few missing entries from the ballet. But I’ve always thought of dancing Foxtrot to Sinatra or maybe Swing. In the ballet, Tango, Rumba, and Samba were definitely represented. So, I took a few minutes to see what the music4dance community has to say about dancing to this music.
And here’s a custom music4dance playlist that includes all eight songs (although one song is the Perry Como version since the Sinatra version isn’t available on Spotify or iTunes).
The eight songs used in “Nine Sinatra Songs” as shown on music4dance.
Are there other partner dances that Tharp drew from in this work that we should represent in music4dance? Are there other Ballroom-inspired ballets out there worth viewing? Do they use different music that you’d like to add to the catalog? Are there other playlists that you’d like to overlay the music4dance information on, like I did with this one? If you have ideas about this post or the site, please comment below or use other feedback mechanisms listed here. And if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way makes sense for you.
A lot of our dance groups over here love to dance the partnered dance sea shells The song “Blue night” by Michael learns to Rock sings the song they dance to. Is there a list on your data base of similar songs to that one that they can also dance Sea Shells to?
This question lead me down one of those beautiful rabbit holes that dance often does.
I had never heard of this dance, but I looked it up and found a YouTube video with the choreographer demonstrating the dance. It was 32 counts (four 8-counts) danced line of dance using a vocabulary that I’m not familiar with but would guess was some flavor of country dance.
Now, when I was learning to lead as a ballroom dancer, my teacher often put together a few eight counts of choreography that I could use so that I wouldn’t have to think as much about what my next move was and concentrate instead on leading my partner and making sure I didn’t run into anyone (or step on my partner’s feet). I understand this is a common technique in the Ballroom community. I ran across similar methods when learning social dances in group classes. So my first instinct was – this is just a slightly more formalized version of that technique – and it has the advantage that your follow knows that you will be doing this same sequence, so the lead should be much easier.
Following that thread, I listened to the song more closely and counted it out. It’s about 97BPM 4/4 and had the feel of an International Rumba or Bolero to me. This gave me the first level answer to the question of what else would someone play if people wanted to dance “Sea Shells” – I went to Advanced Search and selected Bolero and Rumba, limited the tempo to 95-99 BPM (an arbitrary bracket around 97 BPM) and sorted by the most popular – that resulted in this list. I’m convinced that someone who learned “Sea Shells” could dance it to any of the top songs on the list.
But I felt like I was missing something fundamental about this type of dance, and I dug deeper. I didn’t have to do much searching to find a “Dance Step Sheet” with the specific choreography that Dan and Kelly Alboro created. In fact, there were a bunch of places that listed this dance and described the steps. Poking around the websites that hosted such sheets, I found that this is a whole thing. Please pardon my ignorance here since I’m sure many people reading this post know more about such things than I do, but the concept of choreographing a few eight counts of a partner dance and naming it was completely new to me.
My understanding from a relatively brief perusal of these sites is that there is a branch of country dancing similar to line dancing where someone choreographs a number of eight counts using a specific vocabulary, teaches it at an event, and then a whole group of people can dance the same “dance.” The most experience I’ve had with these personally is Wedding Line Dances, but it seems like a fun experience. Doing this kind of dance with a partner rather than the individual line dances I’ve seen in the past feels like a great way to become more comfortable as a partner dancer. In any case, I’ll put a bunch of links at the bottom of this post to sites written by people who know a lot more about this than I do.
Back to the original question: Another answer is that some of the “Dance Step Sheets” for “Sea Shells” list an alternate song that it can be danced to. The song they list is “jumpin’ the jetty” by Coastline. Now, this is a song that shouts Swing to me and is considerably faster (126BPM) than “Blue Night.” So that blows my original thought out of the water. Here is a search for swing songs between 124 and 128BPM. Unsurprisingly, there is no overlap between this list and the one I generated for “Blue Night.” I suspect someone who knows the choreography well can probably dance it to any reasonably consistent 4/4 music at a wide range of tempos. For those who are less expert, there is perhaps an advantage to being on the slower side and having strong phrasing. And I’m sure there are plenty of folks who only want to dance this particular dance to the music that they learned it to in the first place. But as I’ve said repeatedly, I’m way out of my depths here, so if someone who actually knows something about this kind of dancing would care to jump in and help me out, please do.
The last thing I wanted to say about this subject is that I’ve had several requests to support country and line dances on the site. I plan to enable the more traditional country partner dances once I get past some infrastructure issues that are currently blocking me from adding a bunch of new dances. I’m confident I can do that and seed the lists from reliable sources to get something up and running despite my lack of specific knowledge of those dances. Then, hopefully members of the community who know more about those dances can add more. Please let me know if you’re interested in this feature. The more people raise their hands for this feature, the faster it will move up my TODO list.
I hadn’t devised a method for handling line dances before this, partly because I assumed they were all choreographed to a single song. It didn’t seem like the system I’d built would handle that very well. But based on this experience, I’ve come up with a way to “support” line dances without adding code. I’ll throw it out there, and if anyone wants to start adding line dances to the database, I’ll document it more closely and possibly even add some code to make the experience smoother. The idea is pretty simple. Just add a comment with a quoted version of the name of the line dance to the song. Then, people can search on that and get a list of songs to line dance to. Here’s the search for “Sea Shells,” which returns the two songs I’ve discussed in this post.
I will dig myself out of the rabbit hole for now and see if I can make some progress on the infrastructure issue I mentioned above.
Please let me know if you have any thoughts about the subject of this post or the site by commenting below or using other feedback mechanisms listed here. And if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way makes sense for you.
Some interesting links related to the Western Partner dances:
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.
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.
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 of Ricky Martin songs where the beats/minute are twice what they should be (186 for “Casi un Bolero” ?!?!).
The quick answer is that this is wrong for a dancer – listening to this music, I would dance to it at 93 beats per minute rather than 186. And the fact that people have voted for this song to be danced as Bolero (96-104bpm) or International Rumba (100-108bpm) indicates that others would agree.
So why was this listed incorrectly? Unlike other things on the music4dance site like which dance you would dance to a song, tempo at least of a particular recording of a song is not subjective. And even amongst recordings of a song, there is generally not that much variation. Sheet music generally has some kind of tempo marking which will tell musicians the tempo at which they should perform the music. This can range from a general marking like Presto that indicates a range of about 168-200bpm to actual metronome markings of a precise bpm tempo. Music Theory Academy has a great explanation of reading tempo markings if you would like to dig deeper. But my main point is that there is generally a “right answer” to what the tempo is of a piece of music.
This is a piece of music that is intended to be played ate 120 beats per minute as indicated by the quarter note = 120 marking circled in red
But if you notice the tempo that was listed for “Casi un Bolero” (186bpm) is exactly twice the tempo that we would dance to the music (93bpm). Take a moment to listen to it (you can listen to a snippet on the “Casi Un Bolero” page on music4dance or the whole song on Spotify.com). There are two instruments that are defining the beat – bass guitar and drum. If we interpret this song as 4/4 at 93bpm, the bass guitar is emphasizing the first and third beats and playing occasional more complex phrases. But you definitely hear a consistent one/three from that instrument. on the other hand if you listen closely to the drum, it’s playing every eighth note (or 8 times each measure). If you take the drum as the primary beat and definite that as a quarter note rather than an eighth note, you get a tempo of 186bmp. Which is probably not what the musicians are thinking, and certainly not what a dancer is listening for.
Why is this important? Because while many of the tempos listed on music4dance came from dancers who would hear the tempo that they can dance to a song, many other listings are generated via machine learning algorithms. And the machine hasn’t quite figured out how to decide between listening to the bass or listening to the drums. In fact, both algorithms that I’ve used seem to prefer the drums. So I occasionally go though and fix things up. But with a catalog of nearly 40,000 songs and growing I’m not always keeping on top of that task.
As I rework the site, I’m hoping to get a moderation/curation function in to make it easy for others to help out with this. So if you’re interested in helping out in that way, please let me know. And as always I’m happy to hear from you with any kind of question, comment or feedback.
One of the main reasons that I love working on the music4dance project is that I get to hear from dancers and musicians that find the site useful.
Here is a question that a user recently asked:
I searched on your webpage, I could not find info about genre Pop. Can you show me info about genre Pop, please? Will you update/make info about genre Pop like the genre Bolero (https://www.music4dance.net/dances/bolero)
Which is perfectly fair. I have certainly biased towards more information about dance than about music, and have kept the music details to those that specifically apply to partner dancing. The way the site is set up, I have a primary “index” of the various partner dances. Then I think about refining that search on things like musical genre or tempo.
That said, it is still possible to start from musical genre and go from there. The full list of genres that are available on music4dance can been seen on the tags page. The genres are the green tags. And now that I look at it from this perspective, it would be nice to be able to filter on just genre tags – I’ll see if I can get that feature implemented soon1. You can click on the Pop tag on that page and see a list of all of the pop songs in the music4dance catalog.
What I don’t give you in this context is a description of the “Pop” genre the way I do with a dance style. While I think that’s an interesting idea, I feel like it’s been covered elsewhere in more detail than I would be able to manage. For instance, there is a site called rateyourmusic.com that does something pretty close to what I’m doing, but specifically for musical genres rather than dance styles. Check out their Pop page. And of course wikipedia is always a great source for information like this.
I’m always happy to answer questions and would like to get enough questions to make this a regular part of the blog. So please feel free to submit questions via our feedback form or by emailing directly to info@music4dance.net.
Update 2024: I added the ability to filter on different tag types in the tag cloud during my last rewrite of the UI (sometime early in 2021) – check out the documentation for details. ↩︎
There are a bunch of different reasons that you might want to build lists of songs that are more sophisticated than just the songs that can be danced to a specific style. For instance you may be choreographing a piece that you want to switch between Cha Cha and East Coast Swing. Or you might want to get a more comprehensive list of songs that are in the Bolero/Rumba range so you want everything that’s tagged with either of those dance styles. Or, you’re like me and just want to see what dances people have tagged as both Waltz and Foxtrot (two apparently contradictory labels – more on that in a future post).
I’ve just added a feature that enables all of those scenarios. The documentation is here, but let me break a couple of the scenarios down into specifics.
First, let’s say you’re looking for a song to choreograph a mixed East Coast Swing/Cha Cha routine to. Here’s what you do:
Go to the song list page by clicking on Music -> Songs in the menu at the top of the music4dance.net website.
Click on the “more” button near the top of the page
Click on the “any” button that appears and choose “all”
Click in the text box that says “Choose some dance styles…” and start typing “East Coast Swing”, after the first letter or two you should be able to choose from a list. Do the same with Cha Cha
Click on the search (magnifier) button and you should see a list of songs all of which are tagged with both East Coast Swing and Cha Cha
Next, let’s take a look at finding a mixed list of songs. For example, if we want to find all songs that are labeled as either Rumba or Bolero, here’s what you do:
Go to the song list page by clicking on Music -> Songs in the menu at the top of the music4dance.net website.
Click on the “more” button near the top of the page
Make sure that the “any” button that next to the “Dance to” label reads “any.” If it reads “all” then click to choose “any.”
Click in the text box that says “Choose some dance styles…” and start typing “Bolero”, after the first letter or two you should be able to choose from a list. Do the same with Rumba
Click on the search (magnifier) button and you should see a list of songs all of which are tagged with both East Coast Swing and Cha Cha
I hope this is useful to you. If there are combinations of dances that you find particularly useful, please let me know by commenting. Similarly, if there are combinations that you can’t manage with the current implementation please comment and I’ll look at extending this capability even more.
music4dance 