Update (July 2024): This underlying search mechanism described in this series of posts is still in place and functions as described here, but the user interface has changed. Please see theSimple Search and Advanced Search documentation for how the current user interface works.
Give both a try and let me know what you think. I’ll leave both the beta and the legacy search capabilities up on the site for a bit so that you can compare and contrast. Bug reports are welcome here. And as always please submit any general feedback or suggestions here.
Update (July 2024): This underlying search mechanism described in this series of posts is still in place and functions as described here, but the user interface has changed. Please see theSimple Search and Advanced Search documentation for how the current user interface works.
One of the things that I’ve had a lot of fun with is building a sophisticated search engine where I (and you) can do things like find songs that someone has tagged as Waltz and someone else has tagged as Foxtrot. Or find all swing songs that are in a particular tempo range. There are lots of neat things that you can do with the Advanced Search system if you’ve got some knowledge of dance and music and want to dig deep into these corners of the music4dance catalog.
But what if you just want to search through the catalog the same way you would on Google or Bing? For instance, what if you’re looking for a song that has been tagged as Wedding and has the words “Love” and “Time” in it? With simple search you can just type Wedding Love Time into the search box and you’ll get some useful results. You can further refine the search by using some of the standard search modifiers like + and – and putting quotes (“) around phrases to be more precise about your searches (for instance try “First Dance” +Foxtrot +Rock). But if you’re the type that doesn’t bother with that on Google you should be fine not worrying about it here as well.
One of the things that I’m struggling with in the music4dance project is the pull between finding lots of recommendations for songs to dance to against the desire that those recommendations being in some sense ‘good.’ As I noted in my last post, more manual curating will certainly help.
Another way to attack this problem is to tune down the mechanical methods I’m using to find recommendations. So for now I’ve changed the default for most dance recommendations to only pull up songs that someone has explicitly noted are good to dance to that particular style. So, for instance, the Carolina Shag catalog doesn’t get polluted by songs that someone has tagged generically as ‘Swing‘ that happen to be a reasonable tempo to dance Carolina Shag to. And the top 10 lists for individual dance style pages are filtered the same way.
Hopefully this will give you a better start at ‘core’ songs that work for each dance style. Check it out and let me know what you think.
P.S. What if you’re interested in getting the broader range of recommendations? Say you’re looks for songs that might work to dance a style to that might not be quite the musical style that is normally danced to. There are a couple of things you can do. First, you can go to advanced search page and check the “Include Inferred” check-box. This will give you the old results where we pull in songs that are marked with a related dance style and are of an appropriate tempo. Or you can just do a tempo filter on the advanced search page and see what comes up…
The quick answer is to just click this link where you will find a list of over a thousand songs that have been labeled as Foxtrot.
But that’s definitely not the full answer. In that list you will find songs that are too fast or too slow for you to dance to because the Foxtrot is not just one dance style but a family of dances each of which can be danced to a different range of tempos.
When I first started dancing my teachers were from a background that was influenced by American Smooth style of Ballroom dance. So there was a very specific dance that I first learned as “The Foxtrot”. This is what is more precisely known as American Style Foxtrot and the was danced in the range of 30 measures per minute plus or minus a bit depending on competition rules.
In order to answer the more precise question of what kind of music will work for the dance that you are learning, it helps to get a bit of a historical perspective. The Foxtrot follows a pretty common pattern in how partner dances evolve. A style is first danced socially and pulls in moves from multiple traditions. Often something resembling the social dance is performed on stage by exhibition dancers as well. As the style becomes established, teachers take it and formalize it and possibly simplify it for their students. Then social dancers start pulling in things from different traditions and the dance evolves. Sometimes it gets renamed, and sometimes the dance with the same name is just danced differently depending on where and when a dancer learned the style. And never forget the influence of the music that is evolving alongside the dances, perhaps speeding up or slowing down or changing in character in a way that influences how dancers dance to it.
In the case of the Foxtrot, two of the early influences were Peabody and the Tango. The Peabody was a very fast “one step” dance, and the Tango was imported from Argentina via Paris. Harry Fox is the exhibition dancer who lent the Foxtrot his name. Vernon and Irene Castle are the teachers who first formalized the Foxtrot as well as using it in their performances.
Arthur Murray standardized the particular version of the Foxtrot that I learned. He also revived the Peabody as a competition dance to occupy the fast end of the Foxtrot style dances, as he felt that it was more reasonable for students to learn than the slightly slower but more complicated Quickstep.
At some point Charleston influences crept in as a style dance-able to faster music developed, called appropriately, the Quickstep.
To round out this family of dance styles I’ve adopted the name Castle Foxtrot to represent the slowest variations. Much of the music that I’ve cataloged as Castle Foxtrot has been labeled by others as Slow Dance, especially when it relates to Wedding Dances. Many of the moves that are used in Foxtrot can be slowed down and made to stay in place (or on spot) to create something that is much more elegant than the side to side swaying that I first “learned” as a slow dance.
Here is a snapshot of the Foxtrot filter of the music4dance Tempi Tool, as a jumping off point to help you find music in an appropriate tempo for your style of Foxtrot. Just click on any of the tempo ranges to get Foxtrot music in that range.
With the full tool on the music4dance site you can dig further into the relationship between dances and tempos.
Foxtrot was further complicated by the fact that it co-evolved very closely with swing and was often danced to the same music, or at least music played by the same bands. I’ll take at look at what I’ve been categorizing as the Swing family of dances next.
Does this categorization help you at all in how you think about dancing and how it relates to music. Is there a different way that you would slice and dice these dances?
One thing that I completely over-simplified in my description was the influence of regional traditions. Would anyone from around the world care to shed some light on your regional influences to the Foxtrot?
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].
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.
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.
One of the things that was difficult for me as a beginning ballroom dancer (even though I had decent amount of musical background) was to judge the tempo of a song at the level required to know if the song could be danced to in a particular style. I talked about the tool I created to help me with this in one of my early posts (Question 2: What dance styles can I dance to my favorite songs?) Today I’ve added some more complete documentation for the tempo counter tool.
Another thing that always bugs me is the relationship between the tempi of different dance styles. I created another tool to help me visualized the relationships between dances and also posted some detailed documentation for that tool today.
In my last post I showed you how to use the music4dance website if you already had a song in mind that you wanted to use for your first dance, and wanted to figure out which dance style(s) would work with the song. But what if you are particularly in love with one dance style or are just learning to dance one particular style and are looking for an inspiring first dance song in that style?
Let’s take a concrete example. Assume for a moment that you are learning to Rumba, so you’re looking for songs that will work for rumba but are also good songs for a first dance.
Choose Music->Tags from the menu at the top of the site by first clicking on Music (A) then on Tags (B).
Click on the “Wedding” tag (C).
A menu will pop up, choose the option “List all songs tagged as Wedding.” A list of all of the songs in our catalog that have been tagged “Wedding” appears. Since this list includes not only songs tagged as “First dance” but also “Father Daughter” and “Mother Son” tagged songs, let’s further refine our list to just “First Dance” songs.
Click on any “First Dance” tag (D) in the tags column, a small menu will pop up. Choose “Filter the list to include only songs tagged as First Dance.” You will now have a list of songs that have been tagged both as “First Dance” and “Wedding.”
But you are looking specifically for songs that you can dance the Rumba to. So click on the dance selector button (E) (All Dances) and choose Rumba (F).
You will now have songs that you can dance the rumba to that have been tagged as “Wedding” and “First Dance.”
The play button (G) on any song will give you a list of music streaming and purchase options, which at minimum will let you listen to 30 seconds for free to make sure this is the song you were thinking of at if you’re subscribed to one of the services like Spotify or Groove you can listen to the entire song.
You can click on the title link of any song (H) to get even more details including albums that contain this song.
Or click on the Tempo column header (I) to sort the songs by tempo.
Is the style of dance you’re interested in not included please leave a comment or take a few minutes to go through my dance classification survey and help me generalize this system to the style of dance that you know.
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?
music4dance 