Dance students in university tend to have minimum understanding and skills in processing music to address the creativity needs in new dance works. Therefore, effective and critical learning strategies are needed so they are able to process music to create dance works. This research aims at enhancing dance students' understanding and skills to process music in creating new dance works in the future. It was conducted using an action research design involving 30 dance students at one of the universities in Indonesia. The results showed that, in terms of skills and understanding of music, students were not used to processing music for their dance works, since they were mostly assisted by music stylists. Through internal and external music exploration learning, the musical dance students' skills could be improved. Therefore, the findings of this research are recommended to be used as an alternative learning in enhancing dance students' musical ability. [Note: The page range (2406-2424) shown in the suggested citation and header is incorrect. The correct page range is p2621-2639.]