What is the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) website?

Updated

music-encoding.org is the home of the Music Encoding Initiative, a community-driven, open-source effort to define a system for encoding musical documents in a machine-readable structure. It is the place to go if you want the MEI schema, the MEI Guidelines, tutorials, tools, or information about the MEI community and its conferences. The site is co-hosted by the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur in Mainz and the RISM Digital Center in Bern.

What MEI actually is

MEI brings together specialists from various music research communities — technologists, librarians, historians, and theorists — to define best practices for representing a broad range of musical documents and structures. Those discussions are formalized in two complementary products:

  • The MEI schema — a core set of rules for recording the physical and intellectual characteristics of music notation documents, expressed as an eXtensible Markup Language (XML) schema.
  • The MEI Guidelines — detailed explanations of the components of the MEI model, plus best-practice suggestions.

In short: the schema defines what is structurally allowed, and the Guidelines explain how to use it well.

What you can find on the site

The site is organized around a few recurring areas:

Area What it covers
Resources Background, bibliography, MEI logo, pedagogy & praxis
Schemas and Namespace The schema itself and its namespace
Tools Software that works with MEI
Tutorials Step-by-step learning material
Documentation Reference material, including MEI 5, development versions, previous versions, and an archive
Community Contacts, forums, interest groups, technical team, MEI Board, institutional membership, sponsor levels, by-laws, code of conduct
Conference MEC 2027, past conferences, proceedings, MEC awards, hosting guidelines, MOU template

Who runs it and how to take part

MEI is co-hosted by the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur (Mainz) and the RISM Digital Center (Bern). If you want to become an active MEI member, the site invites you to read more about the MEI community and how to join. Development happens on GitHub, where you can contribute by submitting issues or making pull requests to solve them.

Conferences and news

The site publishes news and event information. One current example: MEC 2027, the Music Encoding Conference 2027, will take place 7–10 June 2027 at the German Historical Institute (Deutsches Historisches Institut) in Rome, Italy. The Pontificio Istituto di Musica Sacra is acting as a partner and an additional venue in support of the conference.

When this site is the right starting point

  • You need the MEI schema or Guidelines to encode a musical document in XML.
  • You want tutorials or tools before committing to a workflow.
  • You are looking for the MEI community — forums, interest groups, membership, or the code of conduct.
  • You want conference information, proceedings, or hosting guidelines for a future MEC.

If your goal is simply to read about music encoding as a topic rather than to encode anything, the Background and Bibliography sections under Resources are the more relevant entry points than the schema itself.