The Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) is a community-driven effort to define a system for encoding musical documents in a machine-readable structure. MEI brings together specialists from various music research communities, including technologists, librarians, historians, and theorists in a common effort to define best practices for representing a broad range of musical documents and structures. The results of these discussions are formalized in the MEI schema, a core set of rules for recording physical and intellectual characteristics of music notation documents expressed as an eXtensible Markup Language (XML) schema. It is complemented by the MEI Guidelines, which provide detailed explanations of the components of the MEI model and best practices suggestions.
MEI is hosted by the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, Mainz.
If you want to become an active MEI member, you are invited to read more about the community and then join us on the MEI-L mailing list.
Posted May 31, 2019
The MEI Community is pleased to announce the first draft version of MEI Basic, a simplified profile of MEI intended to support data interchange both within MEI and with other encoding formats.
Posted Mar 1, 2019
The registration to the Music Encoding Conference 2019, 29 May to 1 June 2019 at the University of Vienna is now open!
Posted Dec 6, 2018
The Music Encoding Conference 2019 calls for paper, poster, panel, and workshop proposals to be submitted by the extended deadline of 16 December 2018.