SalsaAsst: Beat Counting System Empowered by Mobile Devices to Assist Salsa Dancers

Yudi Dong, Jian Liu, Yingying Chen, Woo Y. Lee

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

6 Scopus citations

Abstract

Dancing is always challenging especially for beginners who may lack sense of rhythm. Salsa, as a popular style of dancing, is even harder to learn due to its unique overlapped rhythmic patterns made by different Latin instruments (e.g., Clave sticks, Conga drums, Timbale drums) together. In order to dance in synchronization with the Salsa beats, the beginners always need prompts (e.g., beat counting voice) to remind them of the beat timing. The traditional way to generate the Salsa music with beat counting voice prompts requires professional dancers or musicians to count Salsa beats manually, which is only possible in dance studios. Additionally, the existing music beat tracking solutions cannot well capture the Salsa beats due to its intricacy of rhythms. In this work, we propose a mobile device enabled beat counting system, SalsaAsst, which can perform rhythm deciphering and fine-grained Salsa beat tracking to assist Salsa dancers with beat counting voice/vibration prompts. The proposed system can be used conveniently in many scenarios, which can not only help Salsa beginners make accelerated learning progress during practice at home but also significantly reduce professional dancers' errors during their live performance. The developed Salsa beat counting algorithm has the capability to track beats accurately in both real-time and offline manners. Our extensive tests using 40 Salsa songs under 8 evaluation metrics demonstrate that SalsaAsst can accurately track the beats of Salsa music and achieve much better performance comparing to existing beat tracking approaches.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 14th IEEE International Conference on Mobile Ad Hoc and Sensor Systems, MASS 2017
Pages81-89
Number of pages9
ISBN (Electronic)9781538623237
DOIs
StatePublished - 14 Nov 2017
Event14th IEEE International Conference on Mobile Ad Hoc and Sensor Systems, MASS 2017 - Orlando, United States
Duration: 22 Oct 201725 Oct 2017

Publication series

NameProceedings - 14th IEEE International Conference on Mobile Ad Hoc and Sensor Systems, MASS 2017

Conference

Conference14th IEEE International Conference on Mobile Ad Hoc and Sensor Systems, MASS 2017
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityOrlando
Period22/10/1725/10/17

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