When I got into the business of categorizing music by dance style, I knew there would be a lot of ambiguity involved. However, some of the passion behind people’s opinions about what a dance should be called or what tempos are acceptable for the dance called X still takes me by surprise. Several times a year, I get an email from someone who is absolutely livid that I “got the tempo of West Coast Swing completely wrong” or called a dance “Lindy Hop” rather than “Swing” or some other variation on the theme.

I learn a lot from the people who send these emails, and often learn something that helps me improve the site or my general knowledge of dance. One feature I added a while back, based on some of these interactions but haven’t discussed in the blog, was the idea of having “synonyms” for dances.

The way music4dance works, I have to have an unambiguous and unique name for a dance. This leads to somewhat clunky names at times – for instance, the dance that most dances consider “Waltz,” I call “Slow Waltz” to distinguish it from “Viennese Waltz” and to allow for a catch-all category of Waltz. But I want to be able to show other names for dances so people can find the dances even if they know them by another name. This applies both to cases where the dance really is the exact same dance; it’s just named differently to disambiguate it, and in cases where the parameters for what music works are close enough that it makes sense to use the same list of music for both dances.

Cases of actual synonyms:

• Slow Waltz = Waltz
• Tango (Ballroom) = Tango (to a ballroom dancer, as distinct from Argentine Tango)
• Lindy Hop = Swing (to a social swing dancer)
• Slow Foxtrot = Foxtrot
• East Coast Swing = Triple Swing = East Coast = ECS

Cases where the dances are different, but the music is the same:

• Castle Foxtrot = Slow Dance – I started categorizing music that was basically Slow Dance music as Castle Foxtrot, which is a legacy dance that some studios occasionally teach because Castle Foxtrot showed up in my searches as I was designing the site, and fit nicely into the tempo spectrum of Foxtrot-like dances. The practical use of this ended up being more for people looking for “Slow Dance” music in wedding contexts, so I added the Slow Dance synonym. Perhaps I should change the primary name?
• Hustle = DiscoFox – As far as I can tell, these have evolved into different dances but are still danced to similar music. But that is based on web searching rather than personal experience, so please correct me if I’m wrong. I’m also now second-guessing myself as to whether I should add “Swing Fox,” “Disco Swing,” and “Rock Fox” as synonyms, or if one or more of these rates is its own category.

In any case, if you go to the main “Dance Style” page, you’ll see all the styles we’ve set up, along with their synonyms. As this list grows, being able to filter it is more important, so the filter control acts on both the primary name and the synonym. I also handle the synonyms when you search in the search control in the menu bar. So if you type “Slow Dance” in that search box, you’ll find a list of slow dance songs (that are actually tagged as “Castle Foxtrot”). I don’t convert the name of the tag in the results, but I could if that seems important…

I’m posting this now in part because, during my recent round of updates, I broke the showing of synonyms in the Dance Styles page and then realized I hadn’t ever asked for feedback on the feature. The only mention in this blog was the post when I added it as an afterthought to adding Single Swing to the catalog.

Are there other synonyms that I should add? Are there dances that I’ve listed as synonyms that I should break out into separate dances? If you have ideas about this post or the site, 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.