Perpetual Dialogues: A Computational Analysis of Voice-Guitar Interaction in Carlos Paredes's Discography

TL;DR

This paper introduces a computational methodology for analyzing voice-guitar interaction in Carlos Paredes's recordings, revealing that expressive coordination varies by piece and aligns with structural changes, extending music analysis to oral traditions.

Contribution

It develops a novel approach combining harmonic modeling and correlation analysis to study performative traits in oral-tradition music recordings, which lack notation.

Findings

Expressive coordination is mostly piece-specific.

Structural deviations align with formal boundaries.

Method identifies salient musical reorganizations.

Abstract

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.