What makes dance music

Music, in fact, can actually refine your movement skills by improving your timing, coordination and rhythm. Take the Brazilian folk art, Capoeira—which could be a dance masquerading as a martial art or vice versa. Many of the moves in that fighting style are choreographed, taught and practiced, along with music, making the participants more adept—and giving them the pleasure from the music as well as from performing the movement. Adding music in this context may cross the thin line between a killing machine and a dancing machine.

Already a subscriber? Sign in. Thanks for reading Scientific American. Create your free account or Sign in to continue. See Subscription Options. There are some classic, legendary electronic music sounds that make their way into most songs. Once you begin to understand the textures to these sounds the rest of your music making experience will be a lot easier.

Search for inspiration. If you want to make dance music you probably already have listened to a good deal of it. Start by emulating the music that you like. Method 2. Download a digital audio works program DAW. You also want a program that will make your life easier as you proceed with your arrangement. Ableton Live and Bitwig are two popular options. Start with your beat. The beat powers the song and controls how danceable the music is.

To form a good beat, try to pick out just the drums from a piece of dance music. High hat sounds good with straight eighth notes or sixteenths. You can use snare drum to accent and syncopate the beat. Hip-hop uses the clap, so you may want to try to use electronic snare instead.

Consider cooking your own drum beat. Rather than choosing just one prerecorded drum sound, try laying two different ones over each other. This will create a new and unique sound that you can add to your music. The sounds blend together so if you really like the attack of one beat but prefer the body of a different beat you can combine the two.

Devise a bassline. Dance music usually starts with the catchy bassline and elaborates based on repetition. The bassline does not necessarily need to have a bass playing it, but you should choose an instrument that has a lower tone. These lower tones sound good when they are establishing the rhythm. Choose sounds that gel.

Understanding the sounds that work well together is an art. Choosing the right sounds at the beginning is much more important than tweaking levels later on. Pick something that gels right away. Otherwise you may end up rebuilding your track from the ground up later. Visualize your structure. Most dance music has a typical structure.

The Breakdown generally ditches percussion as you transfer from the first chorus to the second verse and the Bridge is another transitional section popular in pop music. Do you want an interlude, a big drop, or a build up?

Ligeti and Strauss. Kubrick leaves space for both image and sound to say something. So far we have only really heard what approach makes good music for dance. The discussion, instead of being an argument about aesthetics, was an honest recognition of the complex machine that is required in the making of new music for dance.

Rather than stating exactly what makes good music for dance, the panel and audience focused on the who, how, why, which is an understandable if not essential approach as works vary hugely in style, pacing, context, audience. Although it is not wise to state exactly what is good music for dance, it is possible to find things in common between pieces that inspire choreographers and energise dancers.

All five pieces on Flux , for example, have their own interior logic and development while leaving space for another artistic voice — a choreographer perhaps — to breathe and to speak.

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