Research

Why do humans make music, and how do they do it? Why are we a musical species? These are the questions that motivate my research. I use computational methods to study how musical traditions differ. Mapping the diversity of musics across the globe, is a key step in understanding the cultural evolution of musics.

Biography

My academic life has been closely connected to the University of Amsterdam: there I first finished the bachelor Bèta-gamma and then the Master of Logic, both with a major in mathematics. Now comfortably at home, I stayed at the UvA for my PhD with Jelle Zuidema, John Ashley Burgoyne and Henkjan Honing at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, University of Amsterdam where I was associated to both the clclab and the Music Cognition Group. Starting in the fall of 2023, I will take up a teaching position at the department of musicology.

For more details, have a look at my CV.

Research projects

2022
Algo PärtAlgorithmic recompositions of the music of Arvo Pärt (to be made public soon)
Neural chantComposing plainchant with an LSTM (to be made public soon)
Rhythm trianglesVisualize rhythm in music and animal sounds using rhythm triangles.
Melody squaresA project visualizing which melodic motifs can be found in a collection of melodies.
Shapes of musicHow to best describe the shapes of melodic phrases in musics from across the globe? This paper adresses precisely that: contour typology.
2021
Social bonding or credible signaling?Two target articles in BBS discussed the origins of musicality. We asked and visualized where the commentators would position themselves in this debate.
Cosine contoursAn ISMIR paper on a novel representation for melodic contours based on cosines.
CatafolkCatafolk: A catalogue of folk music corpora for computational ethnomusicology, presented at SysMus21.
2020
Mode classification and natural units in plainchantAn ISMIR paper that classifies mode in plainchant and by doing so finds evidence for a 'natural' units of chant. This paper won the best multi/interdisciplinary research award!
GregoBase CorpusA large plainchant corpus based on GregoBase
Cantus CorpusA large plainchant corpus based on the Cantus database
2017
Bayesian Language GamesA project that unifies iterated learning with naming games in a new Bayesian language game (MSc thesis)
PainterAn animated drawing environment intended for online iterated learning experiments.
2016
UvA speech to song datasetUvA speech to song dataset, presented at ICMPC 2016 (dataset to be made public soon)
2015
Analogy ColouringA novel variant of the pictorial analogy task, that asks subjects to colour drawings in the same way (student project).

Output

2021
Cornelissen, B., Zuidema, W., & Burgoyne, J. A. (2021). Catafolk: Cataloguing Folk Music Datasets for Comparative Musicology. International Conference of Students of Systematic Musicology.
Cornelissen, B., Zuidema, W., & Burgoyne, J. A. (2021). Cosine Contours: a Multipurpose Representation for Melodies. Proceedings of the 22th International Conference on Music Information Retrieval.
Cornelissen, B., Zuidema, W., & Burgoyne, J. A. (2021). Musical Modes as Statistical Modes: Classifying Modi in Gregorian Chant. Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Analytical Approaches to World Music.
Cornelissen, B., Zuidema, W., & Burgoyne, J. A. (2021). Fixing Huron’s Contour Typology. Poster presented at the Low Countries Music Network Meeting.
2020
Cornelissen, B., Zuidema, W., & Burgoyne, J. A. (2020). Mode Classification and Natural Units in Plainchant. Proceedings of the 21th International Conference on Music Information Retrieval, 869–875.
Cornelissen, B., Zuidema, W., & Burgoyne, J. A. (2020). Studying Large Plainchant Corpora Using chant21. 7th International Conference on Digital Libraries for Musicology, 5. DOI 10.1145/3424911.3425514
2017
Cornelissen, B. (2017). Bayesian Language Games: Unifying and Evaluating Agent-Based Models of Horizontal and Vertical Language Evolution [Master’s thesis]. University of Amsterdam.
Cornelissen, B., & Zuidema, W. (2017). Unifying Horizontal and Vertical Interactions in the Bayesian Naming Game. Poster presented at the workshop Minds, Mechanisms, and Interaction in the Evolution of Language.
2016
Cornelissen, B., Sadakata, M., & Honing, H. (2016). Categorization in the Speech to Song Transformation (STS). Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition, 386.
2014
Cornelissen, B. (2014). Non-measurable Sets [Bachelor’s thesis]. University of Amsterdam.
© 2023 Bas Cornelissen
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