Early Music and the Music Encoding Initiative

The Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) is a collaborative, open-source project focused on building a comprehensive framework for the creation of electronic formats that support encoding of symbolic music notation and other associated data and metadata. The MEI community strives to create scholarly standards for digital musical analysis, criticism and editorial work similar to those available for textual material. The community includes practitioners from a diverse range of related disciplines including musicology, music theory, music librarianship and music technology, each contributing to ongoing discussions and tools for building digital critical music editions. This article provides an introduction to music encoding and MEI in the context of early music