What is "trance music"

n. A style of dance music with fast beats, short melodic synthesizer phrases, and a musical form that builds up and down throughout a track, often played in nightclubs.

Trance is a genre of electronic dance music that developed during the 1990s in Germany. It is characterized by a tempo lying between 125 and 150 beats per minute (BPM), repeating melodic phrases, and a musical form that distinctly builds tension and elements throughout a track often culminating in 1 to 2 "peaks" or "drops." Although trance is a genre of its own, it liberally incorporates influences from other musical styles such as techno, house, pop, chill-out, classical music, tech house, ambient, and film music.

A trance refers to a state of hypnotism and heightened consciousness. This is portrayed in trance music by the mixing of layers with distinctly foreshadowed build-up and release. A characteristic of virtually all trance music is a mid-song climax followed by a soft breakdown disposing of beats and percussion entirely, and leaving the melody and/or atmospherics to stand alone for an extended period before gradually building up again. As a result, trance tracks are often lengthy to allow for this progression and have sufficiently sparse opening and closing sections to facilitate mixing by DJs.

Trance can be purely instrumental, although vocals are also a common feature. Typically they are performed by mezzo-soprano to soprano female soloists, often without verse/chorus structure. Structured vocal form in trance music forms the basis of the vocal trance subgenre, which has been described as "grand, soaring, and operatic" and "ethereal female leads floating amongst the synths".