Tag Archives: Rhythm

Music and Dance

New Feature: Tempo-per-dance, or what if I want to Salsa to this song twice as fast as someone else wants to Cha Cha to it?

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One of the things I’ve been struggling with since very early on in the music4dance story is the fact that not everyone hears the same rhythm when they dance to the same song. Struggling isn’t the right word – it’s a difficult technical problem to solve in the context of the music4dance song index, but a delightful result of the plurality of both music and dance (and musicians and dancers) that I celebrate.

In any case, I believe I’ve finally arrived at a reasonable solution, and it’s up and running on the site. You can now specify that a song is danced at 180bpm for Lindy Hop without trouncing on another dancer’s opinion that it should be danced at 95bpm for Night Club Two Step. And, most importantly, you can filter on Night Club Two Steps between 90 and 95bpm in advanced search, and that song will be included. And a search for Lindy Hops between 175 and 180 bpm will also include our hypothetical song.

I almost stalled out while writing this post because there are so many variations in tempo-per-dance. It’s a rabbit hole I could fall down and not emerge from for a very long time. I clawed my way out of that particular hole by promising myself that I would take time to write a series of posts, each one concentrating on one of the variations. We’ll see how that goes.

Bam Bam

And just to give a concrete example, “Bam Bam” by Camila Cabello was one of the songs that got me over the hump to implement this feature. A couple of sources listed this song as Salsa at 190 bpm, but one of the DJs who contributes to music4dance emailed me to let me know that he has been playing it at his dances as a Cha Cha, where folks dance to it at 95 bpm. And since he is a thorough researcher, he looked it up, and it’s listed at 95 bpm on the official sheet music. So, for a while, I had this song listed at 95 bpm for both Salsa and Cha Cha. But now it is one of the first songs I have corrected to use different tempos for different dances:

Screenshot of “Bam Bam,” showing Salas @ 190 and Cha Cha @ 95bpm
Screenshot of “Bam Bam,” showing Salas @ 190 and Cha Cha @ 95bpm
Salsa search for tempo @190bpm shows “Bam Bam.”
Salsa search for tempo @ 190 bpm shows “Bam Bam.”
Cha Cha search for tempo @95bpm also shows “Bam Bam.”
Cha Cha search for tempo @ 95 bpm also shows “Bam Bam.”

Where to go from here?

I’m spending some time tracking down the songs that are the most egregious offenders that can be corrected with this improvement. That includes things like the 4/4 songs that are half-time/double time of each other. Along these lines, I’ll probably implement more tempo constraints for dances to help me find such offenders – see “Ask music4dance: Why are the tempos that music4dance lists for Salsa wrong?” for more info. If you have thoughts on these kinds of tempo constraints, please let me know.

I’ll also be taking another look at Waltzes that are either marked as 4/4 or danced to other types of dances, since this is generally another flag that something funny is going on with rhythms and tempos.

Are there other places that you’ve noticed tempo listings conflicting with your expectations based on the dances you know well? If so, please take a run at fixing them up – I’ve moved to enabling more community modifications of these attributes, so with this change and updated documentation, hopefully you can fix things that look wrong to you – if not, I’d like to know so that I can improve the feature.

Step of the Month

The “Step of the Month” for June is to check your account management page. It is nice to see the songs another user has tagged. This information is available only to other logged-in members of the community, so please consider making your information available to the community by checking the “Share my Profile” option to improve other members’ experience (the alternative is that your votes and tags are attributed to an anonymous user, which is much less friendly).

What Happens When a Song is Danced at Different Tempos?

Sometimes, a song can be a perfectly good Bolero when heard one way but a Salsa when counting the music differently. Another example is Slow Dance (Castle Foxtrot) vs. Lindy Hop. 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…

msc4dnc's avatar by msc4dnc

Enhanced Feature: Editing Tempos and Deleting Tags

Based on some of the comments on my last post, I’ve been thinking more about my early decisions concerning who can edit various aspects of a song in the music4dance catalog. I was worried that malicious actors would mess with the data, and spent considerable time designing and implementing a system that lets me roll…

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What is a fake Waltz?

I was recently asked why there are songs tagged as Waltz in the music4dance catalog that are in 4/4 time.  This seems almost like the dance version of an oxymoron.   In my brief description of the Waltz on the website I start with “Waltzes are dances that are danced to music in 3/4 time…” To…

msc4dnc's avatar by msc4dnc

Ask music4dance: Why are the tempos that music4dance lists for Salsa wrong?

I’ve addressed questions about tempo in several different ways over the years, and I appreciate the continued feedback, as there is absolutely room for improvement in how the music4dance system handles tempo. Algorithms are far from perfect: The issue at hand is that many of the tempos listed for Salsa were exactly half the speed…

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Music and Dance

What is a fake Waltz?

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I was recently asked why there are songs tagged as Waltz in the music4dance catalog that are in 4/4 time.  This seems almost like the dance version of an oxymoron.   In my brief description of the Waltz on the website I start with “Waltzes are dances that are danced to music in 3/4 time…”

To be honest, the main reason that there are “Waltzes” that aren’t Waltzes in the catalog is that I pull from lots of different sources and even with something this fundamental there are different schools of thought.  I intentionally error towards the inclusive in these decisions since I think that dance should be as inclusive as possible.

A substantial number of these songs come from sources that cater to people looking for wedding dances.  But there are definitely “Waltzes” in 4/4 coming from other sources as well, I’ve certainly seen some exhibition Waltzes performed to music that has almost no discernable beat,  much less a strong 3/4.

I’m not sure where I picked up this term, but these songs are what I have been calling “Fake” waltzes.  If anyone has a better term for this, I would love to hear it.

In any case, a “Fake” waltz is generally a song that is in 4/4 but has a strong downbeat and very weak rhythm otherwise, so that one can dance three steps to a measure without being too distracted by the actual rhythm of the song.   You can find all of the songs that I’ve tagged as “Fake” waltzes by following these steps:

  1. Go to the Advanced search page
  2. Under “Dance styles”, choose Waltz
  3. Under “Include tags” , Choose “Fake”
  4. Click the Submit button

Or just click here for the pre-built search.

You can use the same process, but replace step (4) with choosing “4/4” and you can find all the songs that are cataloged as both waltz and 4/4.

The more interesting variations are to use the same process to find all waltzes that are not tagged “Fake” and not tagged “4/4”.  You can do this by using “Exclude Tags” in step 3 above.

And while I’m on the subject of unusual waltzes, there is another variation on this theme. It is a song with an extremely slow primary tempo where you can fit a very fast waltz half basic (three steps) on each beat. I’ve been labeling these as “triple-time” and the list can be found here.  Although that’s an exaggeration, there is only one song on that list as of this writing – Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful Life”.  Perhaps I’ll find more by the time you read this.

I’m looking into ways to make the fact that a waltz is “Fake” more obvious.  Currently, it’s a tag on the dance which can only be seen when you click on the dance tag in a song list or by going to the song details page.

In the meantime, if you have a strong objection to songs in 4/4 being labeled as Waltz, you’re welcome to sign up and start voting them down or tagging them as “Fake.”

Even more than usual, I’m interested in how other people view this, so please feel free to comment on this post or send feedback directly to me.

Music and Dance

Farewell to Rio 2016, but we’ll always have the Samba

Now that the 2016 Olympics are over and the Paralympics are wrapping up, it seems like a good time to highlight the two dances I’ve included in the music4dance catalog that originated in Brazil. Samba and Bossa Nova are closely related musically and have similar characteristic rhythms, but the Samba is considerably faster than the Bossa Nova.  I’ve updated the catalogs for both dances and added a bunch of new (to me) songs for each dance; check them out:  Samba Song List, Bossa Nova Song List

If you have other songs you think should be on these lists, please let me know by commenting on this post or submitting feedback.  Or participate by creating an account and voting songs up and down.

Before I leave the topic of the Paralympics, I wanted to shout out to one of my personal heroes – Kerri Morgan.

And back on topic (kind of ) – I just noticed that Wheelchair  Dance is a recognized sport in the Paralympics.  I’m off to watch some videos…

About music4dance

Question 2: What dance styles can I dance to my favorite song(s)?

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Again, I rephrased the question from my original post.

One of the things that amazes me about the best dance teachers I know is that they seem to do this matching instinctively.  They hear the first bar or two of a song and immediately know which dance(s) to dance.  I imagine “instinct” in this case is some combination of natural talent, many hours of practice and the amount of time that they spend listening to music and thinking about how it fits with dance.

After dancing for 20 years, I have something of this sense myself, but being a techie first and a dancer second I feel compelled to break it down a bit more.

There are two sub-questions here; let’s call them 2a and 2b.

Question 2a: “Does the style of music match the style of dance?” This is very much about the general feel of the music – so salsa music sounds like music that you would want to salsa to and swing music sounds like music that you would want to swing to.  But it’s also about the rhythm.  The most straightforward example of this is Waltz, where the three-count rhythm is very distinctive.  Conveniently, every partner dance that you can dance to three-count rhythm has waltz in its name.  There are more subtle variations on this concept: Cha Cha music has a distinct “4 and 1 (or cha cha cha)” emphasis that makes it feel like a cha cha, mambo music sounds a lot like salsa, but with emphasis on the second beat, and there is something called “Swing Rhythm” that distinguishes swing music from other kinds of music. And the list goes on.  I don’t have a great idea for a tool to help with this, but I’m considering writing a more in-depth series on how this relationship works.  So if you’re interested please let me know and I’ll move that up my to-do list.

Question 2b: “Does the tempo (speed) of the music work for the dance?”   Swing is a great example since there are a whole bunch of different dances that can be danced to music that is in the swing style, but they are each danced at  a different tempo.  For example, West Coast Swing is best danced between 28 and 32 measures per minute (MPM), East Coast Swing between 34 and 36 MPM and Jive between 38 and 44 MPM.  I’m building a web application  that at least partially solves this problem.

With this app. you can count out a few measures by clicking the count button on the first beat of each measure and it will not only show you what the tempo is, but also suggest a number of dances that will “work” for this tempo.  Pretty slick, no?  What would you add to this to make it more useful?