Music of Puerto Rico centers. After the island was taken over by Spain, the music and dance of Puerto Rico consisted of a combination of the harmonious musical styles that are borrowed from Spanish, African, and other European cultures, creating Puerto Rico's signature style of Latin dance. Salsa is a Spanish word that means sauce. It refers to the mixture of different rhythms composed of different Latin, African and Caribbean dances. Salsa is said to be first created around the 1960s and became popular to the non-Latino world drastically. The salsa dance is similar to the mambo dance. Salsa dancing is structured in six
Salsa music holds the rhythm together. The clave patterns originated in sub-Saharan African music traditions, where they serve the same function as they do in salsa. The two most common five-stroke African bell parts, which are also the two main clave patterns used in Afro-Cuban music, are known to salsa musicians as "son clave" and "rumba clave". Son and rumba clave can be played in either a triple-pulse ( or ) or duple-pulse (, or ) structure. Salsa uses duple-pulse son clave almost exclusively. The contemporary Cuban practice is to write clave in a single measure of . Clave is written in