Listening Differently

Exploring tango music, DJing and dance floor dynamics through RODA

All tango DJs borrow from each other.

We listen to each other's tandas, remember tracks from great nights, exchange orchestras, discuss energy, rhythm, drama and flow. Today, with music recognition apps running on our phones, it has become easier than ever to capture and reconstruct what is being played at milongas and encuentros.

At some point I became curious about whether there might be underlying musical patterns behind different kinds of tango events and DJ sets. Not formulas for "good DJing", but recurring tendencies in how music is combined across tandas and throughout an evening.

Like many other DJs, I initially looked at the things we traditionally work with:

• orchestras
• singers
• recording years
• BPM
• musical character
• personal listening experience

But it quickly became obvious to me, that something was missing.

BPM is a good example. In tango communities, BPM has often been considered unreliable because old tango recordings fluctuate too much in tempo. During this project, however, I gradually began hearing those fluctuations differently. What initially looked like measurement errors often turned out to be expressive musical devices used deliberately by orchestras such as Troilo and Pugliese.

That shift became representative of the project itself.

I started from a fairly traditional tango DJ perspective, shaped by years of listening, dancing and organising, and influenced by environments such as El Corte's DJ Manual, TDJ discussions and Michael Lavocah's writings on tango music. My original idea was relatively simple: could certain musical qualities that tango DJs talk about intuitively perhaps be described through reproducible data?

Not to replace listening or experience — but to support another way of observing music.

Using Librosa, Python and AI-assisted development through ChatGPT, I began experimenting with extracting musical characteristics from tango recordings. Early tests quickly produced variations that intuitively seemed meaningful across different orchestras and musical styles.

But the process also created new questions.

Rhythm could relatively easily be represented numerically. But what exactly is the absence of rhythm? Melody? And what would the absence of drama even mean musically?

Over time, those questions became more interesting than the original attempt to "measure" music.

The emergence of RODA

After many hours of listening, comparing and reflecting, I gradually stopped thinking about the project as a way of classifying tango music objectively. Instead, it became an exploration of how different musical qualities seem to shape movement, atmosphere, attention and social dynamics on the dance floor.

Out of this process, RODA gradually emerged.

RODA stands for:

• R — Rhythmic propulsion
  Pulse, rhythmic drive and musical marking.
• O — Orientation
  Whether the musical energy feels inward and concentrated or outward and expansive.
• D — Dynamic transformation
  Tension, contrast and emotional movement within the music.
• A — Arrastre / kinetic grounding
  The tango-specific sensation of pull, anticipation and forward attraction into the next movement or phrase.

Today these four components are embedded directly into my tango archive and visible inside my DJ software, making it possible to sort, compare and analyse music in ways that were previously difficult to maintain consistently across thousands of tracks.

At the same time, the project has increasingly become less about software and more about listening.

The more I work with the material, the more I notice relationships not only within individual tracks, but between tandas, across evenings and between different types of dance floors.

Some DJ sets seem to create long, gradual musical arcs. Others work through stronger contrasts and shifts between tandas. Some dance floors appear highly responsive to rhythmic clarity, musical tension and inward-oriented energy, while others respond far less noticeably to the music's invitations toward movement, suspension and connection.

At some encuentros with highly experienced dancers, even relatively subtle changes in arrastre, rhythmic tension or musical orientation can sometimes be felt collectively on the floor within a tanda or two. By contrast, at some local milongas, the floor may appear to organise itself far less around the musical structure itself and more around social habits, familiarity or general energy in the room.

I have also become increasingly curious about whether different tango environments gradually develop different musical ecologies — different ways of listening, moving and collectively regulating energy during a milonga.

An encuentro, a marathon, a practíca and a local milonga may not simply differ because of dancer skill level, but because different communities slowly develop different relationships to music and movement.

At this point, I do not experience RODA as a finished theory or a universal system for tango music.

It is better understood as an evolving observational language that currently helps me listen, reflect and navigate differently as a DJ.

The project is still ongoing. Much of the work ahead consists simply of listening, testing and seeing where the process leads next.