Music Fans Topic Challenge #2 - Dancing
We recently had this question about the term for danceability in music. But have there been any scientific studies about what actually makes music danceable?
I would assume it has to do with tempo, time-signature and structure, but are there actual defined parameters?
Many Reddit posts answer this question.
If you mean "danceable by people who haven't memorized the whole piece" you might require a regular enough rhythm that they can follow the pattern.
But it's far from clear what 'regular enough' is. When I was in Alaska I was startled at how many traditional Native dances were in 5 or 7. A whole roomful of people could follow the drummer and manage stomp-step-stomp-step-stomp-step-step just fine.
On the other hand, the one day a year that the symphony played Strauss waltzes for dancing rather than listening... the dancers begged us not to change tempo, not to pause for a second between sequences in the same dance, to not play the 4/4 introductions to 3/4 waltzes...
The answer to this is to some extent culturally/demographically determined, as different dance beats have different effects on different audiences - it’s partly about the beats themselves and partly about the expectations the listener brings to it. It depends on how much syncopation the listeners are used to, it depends on how much the beat is emphasised in a mix, it depends on tempo (and potentially the way that interacts with psychoactive substances taken by the dancers), on the type of dancing the listeners are doing, etc etc.
And it also depends on microtiming in a big way - depending on the genre. So sometimes the difference between danceability and everyone staying off the dancefloor is the rhythm section of a band locking in together - not necessarily just metronomically as timing perfect as possible, but in terms of the ways the drums and bass play around the ‘pocket’ of the beat, in terms of whether they’re consistently in front or behind the beat by microseconds. So there’s whole studies people do in terms of what, e.g., James Brown’s classic bands did in terms of this kind of thing.
Well the pulse for one,the significance culturally, and how The Listener would feel that that period. Give it on the person if they're a club person it might be just four on the floor it's just that steady one two three four on the bass drum, a reggae person might feel the pulse and three, reggaeton feels a different, Latin people tend to feel the clave, and most Afro Cuban music tends to rely on poly rhythms while a waltz fills the pulse on one in a 3/4 time. But there is a lot of interesting word coming out of the London school or Queen Mary's School of London that is bridging the Gap between psychology and some music a lot of resources out there right now. But just remember two beers and you can dance to anything.
