Abstract
Argentine Tango faces dancers with specific challenges. Since the dance is improvised, the leader is expected to follow patterns and trends in the music on the fly. While musicians have an advantage, many beginners prove unequal to the task, and are often driven to abandon. Compass Trainer is a piece of smartphone software intended to help dancers feel and integrate in their movements the ‘Compás’, the rhythmic pulse of the dance. Its development blended theoretical and down-to-earth, practical considerations. Our team had to take into account the mixed rhythmical structure – binary with a ternary component; explore signal processing techniques such as beat tracking; interview tango maestros and musicians, and build a mobile application to help our users discover the rhythmical layers of a tango track. Experimentation in Tango classes was rewardingly successful.
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- 1.
Or sea lions. See [2].
- 2.
Astor Piazzolla’s Contratiempo played by Pichuco (Anibal Troilo)’s orchestra, where the former began as a bandeonist. Many DJs shy away from Piazzolla in fear that the difficulty of his music may discourage dancers; conversely, many dancers begrudge this ban and ask for more challenging and delightful music! A frequent compromise is to have a couple of more difficult tangos (Piazzolla, Pugliese) but not before 2 a.m.
- 3.
We discuss common practice. Of course, experts can develop more freedom and originality.
- 4.
Spanish in origin, the Habanera is but one of the numerous ancestors of Tango music.
- 5.
A most famous example of the superposition of binary and ternary is Piazzolla’s Libertango.
- 6.
Because \(3\,\times \,3\,=\,1 \) mod 8. With an eye on the following discussion, a reference is [1]. Note that the complement set, the cinquillo ‘filling the background of’ tresillo, was actually used as a ternary pattern by Astor Piazzolla – just as a complement form of the Clave rhythm sometimes occurring in Cuban music.
- 7.
We find triolets in tangos composed by classical musicians, more than in popular Tango, cf. Ravel’s Pièce en forme de Habanera for instance.
- 8.
According to Pugliese, the actual notes had little importance because of the poor quality of the instruments on which he played at the time!
- 9.
A word forged for expressing the transformation of an ordinary individual into a dancer.
- 10.
As observed by [3] and other DJs and professionals, much of bass dynamics is lost through (old) recordings and cheap audio systems – not to mention the gut strings used of old for the bass. This is also true of most harmonics (above 5–7 kHz), but this is less of an issue for the perception of rhythm.
- 11.
Letting the computer believe that a waltz has a binary time signature leads to hilarious results. Though automatic detection of a ternary signature has been possible for some time (cf. [9] for instance), we found it simpler to just add the information manually.
- 12.
For instance, pattern-recognition of specific rhythm cells will probably be used in later versions. It will help discriminate between quarter and eighth-notes, 2/4 or 4/4 for instance.
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Amiot, E., Lerat, JP., Recoules, B., Szabo, V. (2017). Developing Software for Dancing Tango in Compás . In: Agustín-Aquino, O., Lluis-Puebla, E., Montiel, M. (eds) Mathematics and Computation in Music. MCM 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10527. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71827-9_8
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