Mid-century timings: an exploration into musical genre, tempo and tempo variability in Ecuadorian música nacional performance

This paper explores the relationships between tempo, tempo variability and musical genre through the corpus analysis of 222 recorded performances of Ecuadorian música nacional. These recordings were released between the years 1942 and 1969, and include some of the most well-known performances of música nacional. Results indicate that: (1) there are significant differences in average tempo between six música nacional genres, suggesting that these have a specific tempo range associated to them in performance; (2) tempo variability is less strongly related to genre, with two genres displaying the most variability; (3) average tempo and tempo variability are sufficient to automatically classify songs into at least five música nacional genres. The main tempo categories in música nacional performances and historical trends in average tempo and tempo variability are also investigated through clustering and statistical analysis, respectively.