What Your Favorite Dance Music Says About You

results from the danceable music survey

I’ve spent too many times trying to force myself to dance to lackluster music at parties, being confused why everyone else seems to like it. Do they just not know what better music is? What’s wrong with them?

(i hate this so much)

So I built a survey to find out. I got ~140 clips of music from a variety of different genres, but with emphasis on music that people tend to dance to. Techno, house, swing, blues, classical, latin, hippie DJ sets, etc.

The hippie DJ sets are my nemesis here, actually. I find them more viscerally tragic than bad music outright, because they are always just teasing you about being good music, you spend hours just wiggling on the edge of hope for some real beat about to drop. This survey is a personal vendetta.

So uh first let’s check - how much do other people agree with me?

I had people rate songs on a scale from 0 (doesn’t make me want to dance) to 4 (extremely makes me want to dance). On average, the songs got 0.82, surprisingly low!

I included 7 clips from ecstatic dance DJ sets, and 7 from general party DJ sets (Burning man’s Mayan Warrior, festival clips on youtube, etc.)

The ecstatic dance songs got rated, on average, 0.93. The festival party DJ clips got rated 0.86. Whereas the songs that I rated as 4/4 danceability got, on average, 0.72.

…So it turns out maybe I am the weird one here. I’m not sure; I picked a lot of slow songs I’d like to dance to, whereas I didn’t sample the slow parts of ecstatic dance DJ sets. If I filter down to only ‘songs I would play at an ecstatic dance peak, the rating hits 0.82 - a bit better but not by much. So maybe my hypothesis of “maybe everyone would prefer the DJ plays better music but there’s some weird social effect where they end up playing bad music instead” seems probably wrong here. Probably everyone actually likes the bad, bad music.

Across all scores, not controlling for anything, the songs rated the absolute highest in danceability were these:

First place: Rasputin club mix, Boney M

Second place: One More Time, Daft Punk

Third place: Hung Up, Madonna

Fourth place: Hey Ya!, Outkast

The four songs rated the least danceable:

1st place: Hellfire, Hunchback of Notre Dame

2nd place: Is Love What You Don’t Know, F.S. Blumm and Nils Frahm

3rd place: Le Diplomate, ALA.NI

4th place: Road to Awe, Clint Mansell

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But maybe the people who like dancing to the bad music are inferior in some way? Maybe their aesthetic appreciation is broken so badly that this will manifest in other areas? Maybe they just don’t understand how dancing works, somehow?

Let’s check. Let’s look at two groups - people who reported having 30+ hours of technical dance practice (around 100 people), vs people with less than 30 (n=278).

Here were the biggest gaps in what these two groups preferred. Reminder these aren’t absolute preference, but rather the biggest difference in the ratings between the two groups.

Here’s the song rated disproportionately danceable by people without technical dance practice:

Killing In The Name, Rage Against The Machine (1.1 with, 1.3 without)

And here’s the song rated as danceable by people with technical dance practice.

Obsession, Aventura (1.3 with, 0.7 without)

My desire to be proven superior is continually frustrated. I like Killing In The Name more than I do Obsession. Most of the songs rated disproportionately highly by technical dancers were latin, which makes me think we’re picking up on the bachata/zouk type people who do a lot of lessons. I really dislike this style of latin music and I’m grumpy.

Okay, but what about creative dancing? I asked people how good they are at dancing creatively, expressionistically, etc.

The song rated best by people who said they weren’t good at creative dancing (compared to people who said they were):

Praise, Kari Jobe (0.4 good, 0.3 not good)

And the song rated best by people who said they were good at creative dancing

Gomd, Sickick (1.0 good, 0.3 not good)

You’ll notice that people who are technically practiced or creatively good, have higher ratings for songs in general. This is cool - there’s probably some generalized dance urge that increases dance responsiveness to all music, and if you have this trait then you’re more likely to work on developing skills to be good at dancing.

And finally, this agrees with a song I like! I really love the song Gomd. I’m going to cherrypick this in support of my crusade.

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I’m gonna go ahead and dump a bunch of data here, without much analysis, though some are pretty funny. My sample wasn’t huge - around 300 people per song. I also made no effort to get a random sample or spot-check this time; this is definitely just ‘correlations of people who follow Aella’.

Personality

I included my usual truncated big-5 survey, which included two questions (one negative, one positive) for each of the OCEAN spectrums.

The songs whose danceability rating correlated the most with low openness:

Nature Boy, Nat King Cole

Hellfire, Hunchback of Notre Dame

London, Thumakda

and the three with highest openness

Formation, Beyonce

Shinigami Eyes, Grimes

Tic Tac, Memba

Conscientiousness

Low conscientiousness people rated these as more danceable:

Boom, Ibenji

Mutant Brain

Active, Drake Jones

And the highest conscientiousness danceability:

Rebellion Joe, Arroyo

Moon River

Zoot Suit Riot, Cherry Poppin’ Daddies

Extroversion

Low extroversion people were most into dancing to these songs:

Road to Awe, Clint Mansell

Timewarp, Sub Focus

La Cumparsita Tango

Whereas high-extroversion people liked dancing to these:

Pray, Gianni Marino

Go Down Deh Spice, Sean Paul and Shaggy

Roaming Sunshine DJ Set (middletown)

Agreeableness

Low agreeableness people found these most danceable:

La Danse, Des Canards

Is Love What You Don’t Know, F.S. Blumm and Nils Frahm

Demiurge, Meshuggah

And high agreeableness correlated most with these:

Tetema, Rayvanny

Rufus Du Sol DJ set

Safaera

Neuroticism

Low neuroticism people were into these:

Psycho, Mia Rodriguez

And the gentle piano shows up again in Is Love What You Don’t Know, F.S. Blumm and Nils Frahm

Le Diplomate, Alani

High neuroticism people had highest correlation with these as danciest:

Flamingo, Kero Kero

Adiago For Strings, Testo

Ladies

I found it amusing that for one of the sub-neuroticism questions, people who agreed with “I’m relaxed most of the time” found Happy, by Pharrell Williams, the most danceable:

Dance styles

I asked about people’s skill levels in five broad dance styles - traditional (irish step dance, cumbia, etc), freestyle (twerking, shuffling, break dancing, etc) partner (ballroom, blues, latin, etc), choreographed (ballet, tap dance, contemporary, k-pop, etc), and spiritual (ecstatic, sufi whirling, butoh, etc).

Traditional

High skill in traditional dances corelated most with finding these songs danceable:

Essence ft Tems, Wizkid

Obsession, Aventura

Rebellion Joe, Arroyo

Freestyle

Skill in freestyle dancing most correlated with finding these songs danceable:

One More Time, Daft Punk

Pray, Gianni Marino

Shake It, David Novacek

Partner

Skill in partner dancing correlated with liking:

Go Down Deh Spice, Sean Paul and Shaggy

Sing, Sing, Sing, Benny Goodman

Chainsmoking, Jacob Banks

Choreographed

People who self-rated as skilled at choreographed dancing were most into:

Bruk Off Yuh Back, Konshens x Chris Brown

Essence ft Tems, Wizkid

Last Last Burna Boy

Spiritual

High spiritual dance skill scores correlated with finding these songs danceable:

Is Love What You Don’t Know, F.S. Blumm and Nils Frahm

About You, XXYYXX

Poof, DSL

Age

The songs that older people found more danceable were these:

Sexual Healing, Kygo

Safety Dance

Shake It, David Novacek

And the younger people’s dance preferences correlated most with:

Flamingo, Kero Kero

Strokur Hildur Guðnadóttir (???)

Espresso, Sabrina Carpenter

Sex

Males most preferred these:

Opus, Eric Prydz

Zoot Suit Riot, Cherry Poppin’ Daddies

Gangnam Style

Adiago for Strings, Tiesto

And females preferred:

Safaera

Fitzpleasure, Alt-J

Formation, Beyonce

I Don’t Feel Like Dancin’, Scissor Sisters

Genderiness

Cis people found these most danceable:

Cold Sweat, James Brown and the JBs

Blue Danube Waltz, London Symphony

One Drink, Dimt

And non-cis people (trans and nonbinary) got the groove on for these:

Psycho, Mia Rodriguez

Miste, Haxan Cloak

Flamingo, Kero Kero

Politics

People who reported being more liberal, also reported finding these songs more danceable:

Tictac, Memba

Mundian To Bach Ke

Crush, Tessa Violet

And conservatives:

Boot Scootin Boogie Brooks and Dunn

Blue Danube Waltz

Nature Boy, Nat King Cole

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And last but not least - I asked people if they’d ever had an officially administered IQ test. Around a third said yes, and of those, I asked them their score.

So: Which songs are found danceable by higher vs lower IQs?