PhDr. Soňa Burlasová, CSc. D., is one of the leading personalities of Slovak ethnomusicology with her systematic study of Slovak folk songs. Her career started as a member of the Czechoslovak Radio Choir in Bratislava and later was a long-time employee of the Institute of Ethnography of the Slovak Academy of Sciences (now the Institute of Ethnology and Social Anthropology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences) in Bratislava.
In the field of research, she has focused on Slovak folk song in several levels: field research of the song tradition and newly emerging works, with an emphasis on regional research of songs, especially from the Horehronie and Hont area, the issue of song genres (Slovak folk ballads, narrative songs, funeral lamentations, wedding, military and recruiting songs, brigand songs, etc.).
The result of a lifetime of research on folk ballads and narrative songs is the multi-volume Catalogue of Slovak Narrative Songs I. - XI. Her pioneering publications include the works Folk Ballads in Horehronie (1969), Slovak National Uprising in Folk Creation (1974), In the Wide Field of Years I., II. Slovak folk ballads, romances and novelistic songs (1982, 1984), Folk song in Horehronie (1987), Military and recruiting songs (1991), Slovak folk ballads (2002).