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 23, 2020
A free, open to the public, series of conferences and workshops focusing on the use of digital humanities in early music research will be offered online at the end of June. The Session II of the Digital Humanities in Early Music Research I series will focus on databases and encoding of early music.
Posted Sep 3, 2019
Registration for the MEI workshop and hackathon at Vanderbilt University is now open! Register (free) at bit.ly/vandy-mei by 17 October 2019. The tentative schedule is listed below.