Music Encoding Initiative

The Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) is an open-source[https://github.com/music-encoding/ GitHub Code Repository] effort to create a system for representation of musical documents in a machine-readable structure.{{cite journal|last1=Hankinson|first1=Andrew|last2=Roland|first2=Perry|last3=Fujinaga|first3=Ichiro|title=The Music Encoding Initiative as a document encoding framework|journal=Proceedings of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval|date=2011|volume=October|pages=293–298|url=http://ismir2011.ismir.net/papers/OS3-1.pdf|accessdate=31 March 2015}} MEI closely mirrors work done by text scholars in the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and while the two encoding initiatives are not formally related, they share many common characteristics and development practices. The term "MEI", like "TEI", describes the governing organization and the markup language. The MEI community solicits input and development directions from specialists in various music research communities, including technologists, librarians, historians, and theorists in a common effort to discuss and define best practices for representing a broad range of musical documents and structures. The results of these discussions are then formalized into the MEI schema, a core set of rules for recording physical and intellectual characteristics of music notation documents. This schema is expressed in an XML schema Language, with RelaxNG being the preferred format. The MEI schema is developed using the One-Document-Does-it-all{{Cite journal |last=Viglianti |first=Raffaele |title=One Document Does-it-all (ODD): a language for documentation, schema generation, and customization from the Text Encoding Initiative |url=https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol24.Viglianti01 |journal=Balisage Series on Markup Technologies |series=Proceedings of the Symposium on Markup Vocabulary Customization |date=2019 |volume=24 |language=en |location=Rockville, Maryland |publisher=Mulberry Technologies, Inc. |doi=10.4242/balisagevol24.viglianti01|isbn=978-1-935958-19-2 |url-access=subscription }} (ODD) format, a literate programming XML format developed by the Text Encoding Initiative.{{Cite web |title=Perry Roland Creates DTD for the Representation of Music Notation, Leading to the Music Encoding Initiative : History of Information |url=https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=5005 |access-date=2023-08-22 |website=www.historyofinformation.com}}

MEI is often used for music metadata catalogs,{{cite journal|last1=Teich Geertinger|first1=Axel|title=Turning Music Catalogues into Archives of Musical Scores–or Vice Versa: Music Archives and Catalogues Based on MEI XML|journal=Fontes Artis Musicae|date=2014|volume=61|issue=1|pages=61–66|url=https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1G1-367965723/turning-music-catalogues-into-archives-of-musical|accessdate=13 January 2016}} critical editing[http://beethovens-werkstatt.de/ Beethovens Werkstatt], a digital genetic edition project using Beethoven's sketch books (particularly of early music{{cite journal|last1=Freedman|first1=Richard|title=The Renaissance chanson goes digital: digitalduchemin.org|journal=Early Music|date=2014|volume=42|issue=4|pages=567–578|doi=10.1093/em/cau108}}), and OMR-based data collection and interchange.{{cite book|last1=Hankinson|first1=Andrew|last2=Pugin|first2=Laurent|last3=Fujinaga|first3=Ichiro|title=Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Digital Libraries for Musicology |chapter=Introduction to SIMSSA (Single Interface for Music Score Searching and Analysis) |series=DLFM '14|date=2014|pages=1–3|doi=10.1145/2660168.2660184|isbn=9781450330022|s2cid=8419715|chapter-url=http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2660184|accessdate=13 January 2016}}{{cite journal|last1=Fujinaga|first1=Ichiro|last2=Hankinson|first2=Andrew|last3=Cumming|first3=Julie|title=An Interchange Format for Optical Music Recognition Applications|journal=11th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference. Utrecht, Netherlands|date=2010|pages=51–56|citeseerx=10.1.1.232.3147}}

MEI uses permissive software licence; the Educational Community License, Version 2.0, (related to the Apache license, 2.0).{{Cite web|url=https://music-encoding.org/about/|title=What is MEI?}}

[http://www.verovio.org Verovio] is a portable, lightweight library for rendering Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) files by transformation into Scalable Vector Graphics format, released under the LGPLv3 license.{{cite web |url=http://www.verovio.org/ |title=Home |website=verovio.org}}{{cite web |last1=Liska |first1=Urs |title=Music Encoding Conference 2016 (Part 1) |url=http://lilypondblog.org/2016/05/music-encoding-conference-2016-part-1/ |website=Scores of Beauty |publisher=LilyPond blog |accessdate=23 November 2018}}