Music Encoding Initiative

The Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) is a community-driven, open-source 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. Read more …

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 MEI community and how to join us. You are also invited to contribute to the development of MEI on GitHub, either submitting issues or making pull requests to solve these issues.

MEI is sponsored by the following Institutional Members:

News

MEI Board: Election Results 2023

Posted Dec 11, 2023

It is our pleasure to announce the results of the MEI Board elections (for the term 2024–2026). Elected by the MEI community are:

MEI Board: Candidate statements 2023

Posted Nov 23, 2023

We are pleased to announce the candidates for the 2023 MEI Board elections. For details, please see their CVs and candidate statements.

Call for nominations 2023

Posted Oct 30, 2023

On 31 December 2023, the terms of three MEI Board members will end. In the name of the entire MEI community, the MEI Board expresses its gratitude to Stefan Münnich, Laurent Pugin, and Kristina Richts-Matthaei for their service and dedication to MEI.

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