Meertens Tune Collections Expanded with 18,000 Dutch Songs

Looking for a medieval mockery song or a twentieth-century love song from the Netherlands and Flanders? Look no further. After years of preparations, the Meertens Institute has supplemented the Meertens Tune Collections (MTC) with the digitised data of 18,000 songs.

With the Meertens Tune Collections, the Meertens Institute makes data sets with digitized melodies available to researchers and other interested parties. By offering the collections as a whole, it becomes possible to make comparisons on a large scale. This is an addition to the online interface of the Dutch Song Database, in which the data of individual songs can be searched for.

The 18,000 songs that have recently been added to the Meertens Tune Collections come from sources from the sixteenth to the twentieth century and form one of the largest academic collections of digitized melodies in the world. These collections are used, for example, for research into melodic similarity, or into automatic analysis of melodic structure. Unknown melodies can therefore be more easily identified. In addition to sites, dates and geographical metadata of the songs, the complete lyrics have also been added. The transcription of the melodies was a meticulous handiwork that song researchers have been working on since 2006. This has made a high quality dataset available.

In the Dutch Song Bank of the Meertens Institute, more than 175,000 Dutch and Flemish songs have been made available, from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. These are love songs, mockery songs, psalms and other religious songs, folk songs, children's songs, Saint Nicholas and Christmas songs and much more.