About Sound for Movement

Nearly twenty years ago, Michael noticed dance teachers spending evenings searching through piles of CDs to find the right track for class: something with the right meter, tempo, feel, and without awkward lyrics.

When MP3s became easy to sell online and PayPal links could make checkout simple, the first version of Sound for Movement became a direct way to find and buy that music. It went through several websites before becoming the catalog, membership, licensing, playlist, and Scores site it is now.

The musical part reaches back to 1995, when Michael began playing for dance classes at Rutgers University under Robert "Tigger" Benford. It continued through classes, rehearsals, commissions, performances, and teaching at The Ohio State University and the University of Utah, with additional time learning from musicians at the American Dance Festival and Bates Dance Festival.

Sound for Movement is built on nearly 30 years of playing music for dance classes, working with hundreds of teachers and thousands of students. The music moves through piano, trumpet, harmonica, djembe, congas, modular synths, voice, audio engineering, notation, and production tools.

Sound for Movement has contributed to education at universities and dance programs through teaching, guest lectures, and curriculum development for teaching music to dancers. That work includes rhythm, listening, software, and ways for dancers to make their own music.

Learn is where that belongs on the site now. The goal is to build a full library of subscriber learning materials: rhythm, music skills for dance, creative technology, piano, sound design, music history, and practical ways to make and use music.

Sound for Movement became its own company in 2013 after earlier distribution work with A Simple Sound. Today it brings together streaming, downloads, playlists, licensing, membership, and Scores, the built-in tool for arranging catalog tracks into a finished audio file.

The catalog now includes more than 575 original tracks and 70 albums and EPs. The next goal is more original music, more albums, better metadata, better search, and learning materials that stay close to the catalog instead of sitting off to the side.

That is the work: make the music easier to find, make licensing easier to complete, keep learning materials close to the catalog, and keep building the website around what dancers, teachers, choreographers, and filmmakers need from the music.