12th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR 2011) THE MUSIC ENCODING INITIATIVE AS A DOCUMENT-ENCODING FRAMEWORK Andrew Hankinson1 Perry Roland2 Ichiro Fujinaga1 1CIRMMT / Schulich School of Music, McGill University 2University of Virginia
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[email protected] ABSTRACT duplication of effort that comes with building entire encoding schemes from the ground up. Recent changes in the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) In this paper we introduce the new tools and techniques have transformed it into an extensible platform from which available in MEI 2011. We start with a look at the current new notation encoding schemes can be produced. This state of music document encoding techniques. Then, we paper introduces MEI as a document-encoding framework, discuss the theory and practice behind the customization and illustrates how it can be extended to encode new types techniques developed by the TEI community and how their of notation, eliminating the need for creating specialized application to MEI allows the development of new and potentially incompatible notation encoding standards. extensions that leverage the existing music document- 1. INTRODUCTION encoding platform developed by the MEI community. We also introduce a new initiative for sharing these The Music Encoding Initiative (MEI)1 is a community- customizations, the MEI Incubator. Following this, we driven effort to define guidelines for encoding musical present a sample customization to illustrate how MEI can documents in a machine-readable structure. The MEI be extended to more accurately capture new and unique closely mirrors work done by text scholars in the Text music notation sources.