Perpetual Dialogues: A Computational Analysis of Voice-Guitar Interaction in Carlos Paredes's Discography
This work addresses the challenge of analyzing performative interactions in oral-tradition and improvisation-inflected music for computational musicologists, offering a generalizable strategy for repertoires without notated blueprints.
The study tackled the problem of analyzing voice-guitar interaction in Carlos Paredes's vocal collaborations, an oral-tradition context lacking notated scores, by developing a computational methodology using source separation and audio descriptors; the result showed that expressive coordination is piece-specific, with diversity events aligning with formal boundaries, enabling identification of musically salient reorganizations with minimal human annotation.
Computational musicology enables systematic analysis of performative and structural traits in recorded music, yet existing approaches remain largely tailored to notated, score-based repertoires. This study advances a methodology for analyzing voice-guitar interaction in Carlos Paredes's vocal collaborations - an oral-tradition context where compositional and performative layers co-emerge. Using source-separated stems, physics-informed harmonic modelling, and beat-level audio descriptors, we examine melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic relationships across eight recordings with four singers. Our commonality-diversity framework, combining multi-scale correlation analysis with residual-based detection of structural deviations, reveals that expressive coordination is predominantly piece-specific rather than corpus-wide. Diversity events systematically align with formal boundaries and textural shifts, demonstrating that the proposed approach can identify musically salient reorganizations with minimal human annotation. The framework further offers a generalizable computational strategy for repertoires without notated blueprints, extending Music Performance Analysis into oral-tradition and improvisation-inflected practices.