Usage

2009/11/10

For best performance, please follow these instructions.

  • After starting the Dancing Guide, hold it towards the music source with the mobile phone microphone in the direction of the music. The microphone is usually at the bottom of the mobile phone - check the documentation if unsure!

  • Press the on-screen Start! button while holding the phone in this position. A nimble person might be able to press the on-screen button in this position - take care not to drop your phone! Alternatively, navigate via the trackpad to the on-screen start button (it should get a red background) and press the confirmation button in the center of the trackpad. Audio recording will start immediately. After five seconds, audio recording is finished and the phone shows Analyze....

  • Turn it around again after a bit more than five seconds to wait for the result.

  • If you can, please give feedback: is it correct, is it wrong, and if it's wrong - what's the correct dance? Your feedback is essential for us to improve the system further.

Finally, the system does not recognize non-music, music that is not loud enough, or music for a dance it does not know yet. Currently Samba, Tango, Waltz, Jive and Cha-Cha-Cha are supported.

What is the difference to Shazam and other music id systems?

Music id systems use a song database containing several billion of songs. We do not need such a database, but directly analyze audio data by beat and spectrographical frequency features. This has the following advantages:

  • We recognize live and classic instrumenal music where music id systems have large difficulties recognizing any song.

  • We also recognize completely new and unknown songs which have not been imported into the song database of music id systems. Many adapted dancing songs are within this category.

  • The Dancing Guide does not need an internet connection to work. The whole processing is done locally on the mobile phone while music id systems always need to send the recorded audio data to a server. Not needing an internet connection is essential for use within discos and ballrooms where connectivity might be impaired or sparse.

What does the app use the Internet for?

The main use is for pushing feedback to our server. We are also interested in usage information and what local language is configured so we can add new localized versions as needed. We are also interested in what version of Android you are running. Our web service will also notify the application when new versions are available so you can install them as soon as possible.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to our translators Andreas Heindl (es), Gregoire Auger (fr), Christoph Barszczewski (pl), Ondřej Jílek (cs), Witono Halim 林有為 (zh), Melanie Magnée (nl) and Paolo Petta (pt).