Communications of the ACM
Understanding Salsa: How Computing Is Defining Latin Music
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Latin America, with its rich and varied cultural heritage, is a region widely known by its diverse musical rhythms. Indeed, music and dance constitute an important part of Latin American cultural assets and identity.2 Some of these rhythms, although famous worldwide, belong to specific regions; for example, samba is from Brazil, tango is from Argentina, merengue is from the Dominican Republic, corrido is from Mexico and vallenato is from Colombia, among many other examples. Most of them were created by the cultural interaction between people from African, Native American, and European cultures that shared their music and instruments. Those heterogeneous cultural characteristics made these music styles appealing to an international audience.
One of the most well-known Latin musical genres is salsa—a genre considered a fusion between several popular Latin music styles such as son montuno, guaracha, mambo, bolero, and chachacha, to mention a few. However, most of the research on the salsa musical genre is based on ethnomusicology, which has revealed salsa's complex and diverse social and cultural aspects. Indeed, salsa is an amalgamation of Latin traditions and musical styles representative of the Afro-Hispanic culture in the urban-industrial working class. Salsa songs voice concerns of scarcity, violence, inequality, and desperation, which are musically translated using violent orchestration.3
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