I have two questions about the music tempos listed with the Standard CDs.

1. The waltzes on the Ballroom Swing CD are listed at 69 BPM compared to the 84-90 BPM for other CDs. Is this right? They seem to be approximately the same tempo as the others and if anything a bit faster than the 84 BPM on other CDs.

2. The BPM for five different dances seem to be on a different scale than tempos listed for albums on differnt web sites. For example.

Waltzes 84-90 compared to 29-30 for other websites
Tangos 128-132 compared to 32
VW at 174 compared to 60

It is very helpful to know the tempos and to have them comparable. I'm a bit in the dark here. Can you help me out

In creating the website, I'm frequently faced with decisions along the way. I try to be as impartial as possible, but certain issues simply require that I make a choice. Displaying music in measures per minute or beats per minute was one of them. Most of the time I'll go along with the mainstream, because conformity is more useful than precision. But occasionally I'll take the road less traveled, in the hopes that others may follow suit. (This is especially true with issues of music, since I am also a professional musician).

The problem with displaying music in terms of measures per minute is simply that it's inaccurate and sometimes misleading. If I told you that a Waltz was 30 MPM and a foxtrot was 30 MPM, you'd assume that they were the same speed. But actually, the Waltz would be much slower because it has a time signature of 3/4. A 30 MPM Waltz is only 90 BPM (30x3), while the 30 MPM Foxtrot is actually 120 BMP. Big difference.

Now it gets worse when we think of dances such as Samba, Paso Doble or Tango, which are sometimes written in 2/4 and other times in 4/4. Depending on who you talk to, the same exact Samba might be 50 MPM, or it might be 25 MPM, depending on whether they're thinking in 2 or 4. But no matter who you talk to, the same Samba would always be 100 BPM, because 100 beats is always 100 beats, no matter how you slice the time signature.

So for the sake of consistency, I chose beats per minute. It's against the norm for dancers (not for musicians), but then I think that sometimes dancers have a thing or two that they can learn from musicians (especially in the area of music). So I stand by my decision in this case to go with what I think is right, instead of what's common in the dance world.

In the future, if I get a chance, I may do a little fancy footwork in the programming department and give each user the ability to set his or her own preferences in terms of how tempo is displayed. But even then, I will still have to make a decision about how it is displayed by default. Like I said, as diplomatic as I try to be most of the time, circumstances sometimes force me to make decisions one way or the other.

Sincerely,
Jonathan Atkinson
www.ballroomdancers.com

Incidentally, the tempo for the Waltzes on Ballroom Swing was indeed listed incorrectly. It should be 87 bpm, which is 29 mpm. I've already fixed it. Thanks for pointing it out.

Sincerely,
Jonathan Atkinson
www.ballroomdancers.com

On the second point, the answer is that tempos are sometimes measured in beats per minute and sometimes in measures per minute. A measure can be 2, 3, 4, or 6 beats depending on the type of music. Most often 3 for waltzes and 4 for everything else.

In my personal music collection I keep track of beats per minute for all song types, just for consistency's sake and to make it easy to compare tempos of different music styles (though in some cases that's not meaningful.) But measures per minute seems to be more commonly used.