In this article, we investigate meandric systems having one shallow side: the arch configuration on that side has depth at most two. This class of meandric systems was introduced and extensively examined by I. P. Goulden, A. Nica, and D. Puder [Int. Math. Res. Not. IMRN 2020 (2020), 983–1034]. Shallow arch configurations are in bijection with the set of interval partitions. We study meandric systems by using moment-cumulant transforms for non-crossing and interval partitions, corresponding to the notions of free and Boolean independence, respectively, in non-commutative probability. We obtain formulas for the generating series of different classes of meandric systems with one shallow side by explicitly enumerating the simpler, irreducible objects. In addition, we propose random matrix models for the corresponding meandric polynomials, which can be described in the language of quantum information theory, in particular that of quantum channels.