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.
Selected projects
research 2025
Rhythmic Segment Analysis
This paper addresses how to conceptualize, visualize, and measure regularities in rhythmic data.
research 2024
🤘 Manual Music
Manual Music is an experiment that tries to turn the hand into an instrument.
research 2024
Measuring Musics
On Friday 23 February 2024 Bas defended his PhD dissertation Measuring musics: Notes on modes, motifs, and melodies at the University of Amsterdam.
research 2024
🌞 Delasol
The Delasol project aims to develop methods for automatic hexachordal solmization. Currenty it supports sixteenth-century continental and English solmization styles.
research 2022
Neural chant
Modelling Gregorian chant with a lstm-based language model. How does such a model learn to represent syntax and pitch structures?
research 2022
Shapes of music
How to best describe the shapes of melodic phrases in musics from across the globe? This project adresses precisely that: contour typology.
research 2022
Rhythm triangles
A project to visualize rhythm in music and animal sounds using rhythm triangles.
research 2021
Catafolk
Catafolk automatically indexes and analyzes folk music datasets. It collects all metadata in standardized, easy to use csv files. These CSV files are also used to generate the Catafolk website.
research 2021
Chant21 & chant corpora
Chant21 is a Python library for working with plainchant in Music21. This is released in tandem with two chant corpora: CantusCorpus and GregoBaseCorpus.
research 2021
Bonding or signaling?
Is the evolution of music more likely explained by the social bonding hypothesis or the credible signalling hypothesis?
research 2020
Mode classification in Western plainchant
Code and data for our ISMIR2020 paper 'Mode Classification and Natural Units in Plainchant'. This paper won the best multi/interdisciplinary research award!
research 2017
Bayesian Naming Games
Interpolating between iterated learning and naming games, we propose a Bayesian model of cultural evolution.
Academic biography
My academic life has been closely connected to the University of Amsterdam, where I did my bachelors (Bèta-gamma) and masters (Logic), both with a major in mathematics. I then went on to do a PhD in computational musicology with Jelle Zuidema, John Ashley Burgoyne and Henkjan Honing at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, which I defended in early 2024. Afterwards I worked as a lecturer in cognition and computation at the department of musicology at the Univeristy of Amsterdam. In 2025–26, I have a postdoctoral position with Henkjan Honing at the Music Cognition Group.
Output
2025
Cornelissen, B. (2025). Rhythmic Segment Analysis: Conceptualizing, Visualizing and Measuring Rhythmic Data. UvA Dare.
Cornelissen, B. (2025). Beyond the nPVI [Poster].
2024
Cornelissen, B. (2024). Measuring Musics: Notes on Modes, Motifs, and Melodies [Phdthesis]. University of Amsterdam.
Cornelissen, B., Braithwaite, T., Burgoyne, J. A., & Haug, A. (2024). The Helping Hand: A Computational Perspective on Guidonian Solmisation. Medieval and Renaissance Music Conference, 97.
2022
Cornelissen, B., Zuidema, W., & Burgoyne, J. A. (2022). Understanding Automatic Mode Classification in Western Plainchant. 50th Medieval and Renaissance International Music Conference (MedRen 2022).
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. https://doi.org/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.