Throughout the last decades a new enthusiasm for local music and an increasing trend towards rediscovering old local dances and tunes gained momentum in the island of Crete. In the presented analysis I combine an ethnographic with a comparative approach, driven by audio signal analysis tools, in order to address the question of how far tunes that serve to define local and micro-local identities differ in certain aspects with regard to the sound of performances. For this I investigate three sound aspects of Cretan leaping dance performances: tempo, rhythmic stress patterns, and contained melodic patterns. I accompany the analytical results with information obtained from my interviews with dancing teachers and musicians. My results depict small but significant differences depending on the dance, but also underline the great homogeneity of the repertoire. The results imply that all three aspects contribute to the fine differences between the dance tunes, with a clear emphasis on the melodic phrases. Therefore, this study with its findings and its computational tools paves the way towards the establishment of dictionaries of characteristic melodic phrases of Cretan dance repertoire, as well as of dance tunes with similar morphology.