We are pleased to announce our call for papers, posters, panels, and workshops for the Music Encoding Conference 2025.
The Music Encoding Conference brings together members from music encoding, analysis, performance, and research communities, including musicologists, theorists, librarians, technologists, music scholars, teachers, and students, providing an opportunity for all participants to learn from and engage with each other.
The conference will be held 3–6 June 2025 at City University of London, UK, jointly organised by Goldsmiths University of London and City University of London on behalf of the Music Encoding Initiative community.
Conference date: 4–6 June (with pre-conference workshops on the 3rd and un-conference and business meetings day on the 6th)
Location: City University of London, UK
Deadline for proposals: 13 20 December 2024
Notification of acceptance: 13 February 2025
Registration deadline for authors: 13 April 2025
Final revision of abstracts: 29 April 2025
For further questions, please e-mail conference2025 at music-encoding.org
The Music Encoding Conference has emerged as the foremost international forum where researchers and practitioners from varied fields can meet and explore new research built on digital music editions and, especially, research into music encoding itself. The Conference celebrates a multidisciplinary program, combining the latest advances from established music encodings, novel technical proposals and encoding extensions, and the presentation and evaluation of new practical applications of music encoding (e.g. in academic study, libraries, editions, pedagogy).
When using and manipulating digital music information, the properties and behaviours of its encoding are of fundamental importance. This applies equally for musicological study, music theory, production of digital editions, composition, performance, teaching and learning, cataloguing, symbolic music information retrieval and recommendation, or more general electronic presentation of musical material and associated narratives. The study of music encoding and its applications is therefore a critical foundation for the use of music information by scholars, librarians, publishers, and the wider music industry.
The program welcomes contributions from all those working on music encoding, but also those whose research builds on digital music resources or corpora. Newcomers are encouraged to submit to the main program, demonstrating with articulations of the potential for music encoding in their work, and highlighting strengths and weaknesses of existing approaches within this context. We are particularly seeking to broaden the scope of musical repertories considered, and to provide a welcoming, inclusive community for all who are interested in this work. The Music Encoding Conference is supported and organised by the Music Encoding Initiative, which will hold its annual community meeting on Friday, 6 June.
Pre-conference workshops provide an opportunity to quickly engage with best practices in the community. Following a formal program, unconference sessions will be held on 6th June 2025, designed to foster collaboration in the community through the meeting of Interest Groups, and open participation in discussions on hot topics that emerge during the conference. Spaces for these meetings have been generously provided by the hosting institution. As part of the conference, we would like to extend an invitation to attendees who may wish to organize additional meetings (e.g. project meetings) or other collaborative sessions in conjunction with the event. Availability for meetings during or immediately before or after the conference can be checked upon request. Please be in touch with conference organizers if you need to reserve these spaces.
The conference welcomes contributions from all those who are developing or using music encodings in their work and research.
Topics around music encoding include, but are not limited to:
And those concerned with use might include:
The Program Committee for the Music Encoding Conference 2025 will accept proposals for papers, posters, panels, and workshops. All submissions will be double-blind peer-reviewed by multiple members of the committee before a decision is made on acceptance. After the review process, authors of accepted submissions will have the opportunity to make non-substantive revisions before the conference. These revisions are intended to address minor corrections or clarifications suggested during the review process and do not include major changes to the content or scope of the submission. Please also refer to this statement on the use of generative AI in submissions.
Accepted abstracts will be published as part of the conference program and a Book of Abstracts after the conference.
Authors are invited to upload their anonymized submission for review to our Conftool website: https://www.conftool.net/mec2025/
The deadline for all submissions is 13 20 December 2024 (see IMPORTANT DATES above). All submissions should include a title, author information (only in ConfTool!), a short abstract, up to five keywords and a PDF file of your proposal. Conftool accepts PDF files only. Since review will be anonymous, please ensure that all identifying information is removed from your PDF before submission.
Please follow this GoogleDoc template for your PDF proposals (contact PC if not available). Word counts apply to the text of the proposal, excluding titles, keywords and references.
Long papers: 1000-1500 words.
Long papers are expected to present overviews or specific aspects of ongoing or completed projects, detailed case-studies or elaborated perspectives on best practices in the field, or provide in-depth reports on topics relevant to the conference.
Speakers will be given 30 minutes: 20 minutes for a presentation, and 10 minutes for discussion.
Short papers: 500-1000 words.
Short papers are suitable for introducing tools, new ideas, and experimental topics.
Speakers will be given 15 minutes: 10 minutes for presentation, 5 minutes for discussion.
Panels: 1500-2000 words.
Panels are suited to coordinated approaches or discussions relating to a single theme, or round-table discussions. Particularly welcome are those with interactive elements, such as Q&A sessions or community consultation. Submissions should describe the topic and nature of the panel, along with its format, including titles and short abstracts for any presentations that will form part of the session. It should be clear from the text how any presentations are connected, and the way these will be integrated into the discussion.
Panel sessions will be given 90 minutes, which can be used flexibly.
Posters: 500-1000 words.
Posters are expected to report on early-stage work, introduce new work, projects, or software, or present experimental ideas for community feedback. Poster presenters will have the chance to engage with interested parties more about their project during the poster exhibition, where the audience can browse freely.
Poster Size: maximum DIN A0 (841 x 1189 mm or 33.1 x 46.8 inches), portrait format.
Half- or full-day workshops: 1000-1500 words.
Proposals must include the names of the conveners, a description of the workshop’s objective and proposed duration. Proposals must also include: