It is not surprising, however also unfortunate, that many learning to dance salsa hardly hear the music.  There are so many things to think about and to do that music is often relegated to ambience.   Furthermore, for many dancers who grew up on North American top-forty music, where the beat is usually uncomplicated and so dominating as to be unavoidable, layered Latin American rhythms may sound confusing, even baffling.  Finding the beat may be difficult.  This is for me also one of the most confounding aspects of teaching salsa. If a dancer doesn’t hear the beat or feel the rhythm, it is difficult to teach it. 

Music is the principal external factor that serves to connect the partners in dancing.  The rhythm or beat provides the pace and establishes the basis for the temporal coordination of partners.  The musicality of the music creates the shifts and moods and breaks for the dancers to jointly express themselves by dancing in a way that complements the music.  Dancers create another layer of rhythm, thus becoming musicians as well as dancers, through the conventional salsa basic rhythm step pattern of 1, 2, 3, pause, 5, 6, 7, pause.  Where in the music they dance—that is “on 1,” “on 2,” or anywhere else in the 8-count—shapes the feeling and character of their experience relative to the music.  Dancers’ interconnection to the music also occurs where their movement is in relationship to the breaks and shifts in the music and where dancers interpret the mood and feeling of the music in their dancing style.  The salsa connection here extends to include the character, feel, and rhythmic distinctness of each piece of music.  Dancers connect with one another by dancing to the music, yet, even more importantly, through their joined interpretation of and contribution to the music.