The Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) is an open-sourceGitHub Code Repository
/ref> effort to create a system for representation of musical documents in a machine-readable structure. MEI closely mirrors work done by text scholars in the

Text Encoding Initiative The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is a text-centric community of practice in the academic field of digital humanities, operating continuously since the 1980s. The community currently runs a mailing list, meetings and conference series, and main ...

(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 An XML schema is a description of a type of XML document, typically expressed in terms of constraints on the structure and content of documents of that type, above and beyond the basic syntactical constraints imposed by XML itself. These constra ...

Language, with

RelaxNG In computing, RELAX NG (REgular LAnguage for XML Next Generation) is a XML schema, schema language for XML—a RELAX NG schema specifies a pattern for the structure and content of an XML document. A RELAX NG schema is itself an XML document but R ...

being the preferred format. The MEI schema is developed using the One-Document-Does-it-all (ODD) format, a

literate programming Literate programming is a programming paradigm introduced in 1984 by Donald Knuth in which a computer program is given as an explanation of its logic in a natural language, such as English, interspersed (embedded) with snippets of macros an ...

XML format developed by the Text Encoding Initiative. MEI is often used for music metadata catalogs, critical editing (particularly of early music), and OMR-based data collection and interchange. MEI uses

permissive software licence A permissive software license, sometimes also called BSD-like or BSD-style license, is a free-software license which instead of copyleft protections, carries only minimal restrictions on how the software can be used, modified, and redistributed, ...

; the

Educational Community License The Educational Community License (ECL) is a free and open source license based on the Apache license (version 2.0) and created with the specific needs of the academic community in mind. Version 2.0 of the ECL came out of the Licensing and Polic ...

, Version 2.0, (related to the Apache license, 2.0).
Verovio
is a portable, lightweight library for rendering Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) files by transformation into

Scalable Vector Graphics Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is an XML-based vector image format for defining two-dimensional graphics, having support for interactivity and animation. The SVG specification is an open standard developed by the World Wide Web Consortium sinc ...

format, released under the LGPLv3 license.

References

External links

Website of the Music Encoding Initiative

Verovio, an MEI rendering library

MerMEId, a Metadata editor

MPM - Music Performance Markup, a format for performance modelling on the basis of MEI data
{{Document markup languages Music notation file formats Musical markup languages Musical notation Musicology Digital humanities XML-based standards Markup languages Metadata standards Data modeling languages