One of the attributes of a dance is its “intensity”. This is intended to give an idea of how busy the dance is. It is normally shown in both detail and summary form.
The summary is fairly straightforward and is just the percentage of the whole dance that any individual dancer is dancing (excluding stepping up or down). For a two or three couple dance in a four couple set that percentage might be shown both for the two or three couples dancing one turn (eg 32 bars) and for the average over the whole dance (eg 8x32 bars).
The detail of the intensity per couple needs a bit more explanation. The general idea is that it shows the number of bars which each couple is dancing for each phrase of typically 8 bars. If only one dancer in a couple is active for part of the phase, the intensity is averaged between them. The successive phrases are separated preferably by / or else a space.
Take for example the dance Hooper's Jig where the dance intensity is given as:
804 840 706 880 = 55% (1 turn), 41% (whole dance)
For one turn of 32 bars for each of three couples the maximum is 3 x 32 = 96 bars. Adding 8+0+4 + 8+4+0 + 7+0+6 + 8+8+0 gives a total of 53 bars. Dividing by 96 bars gives 55% for one turn of the dance. For the whole dance each couple is active for 6 turns out of 8, so the overall intensity is 3/4 of 55% which is 41%.
The same scheme applies to 2, 4, 5 or more couple dances and for those with more than 32 bars. In each case the number of active bars is given for each couple for each 8 bar phrase. In a similar way to the three couple example above, for a two couple dance in a four couple set with only 1st and 2nd couple starting, the overall intensity is 11/16 of the value for one turn. Some more examples are:
For SCDDB editors entering this information, you might think the database could calculate the summary numbers from the per couple bar counts. However there are cases where the detailed per couple text is more complex, eg for dances with multiple sections, so its not easy to analyse.
The scheme also gets difficult for dances with 10 bar phrases such as The Wee Cooper O' Fife where counts for each couple need to be separated with commas as well as phases separated by /.
When entering dance intensities I use a tiny program to calculate the summary - at least for simple cases. This can be made available on request (if you know how to run python scripts on your computer).
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