Digital Music Notation Data Model and Prototype Delivery System

This proposal requests funding for a multi-year, bilateral, collaborative effort to produce a Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) demonstration project and to engage in dissemination efforts that will establish MEI as the predominant academic encoding standard for music notation. The encoding of notated music is an essential prerequisite for all future handling of music within digital environments. While a number of attempts at music encoding models have been made, no previous model is capable of addressing the wide variety of musical notations employed from the medieval period to the present day and of handling the full flexibility and ambiguity of written musical notation. During the Digital Music Notation Data Model and Prototype Delivery System project funded by a 2009-2010 DFG/NEH Bilateral Digital Humanities Program: Bilateral Symposia and Workshops grant, an international advisory board determined that MEI had the potential to address these critical problems. As a result of the development of standards and technical workflows resulting from the symposia, MEI is ready for adoption by the musical scholarly community.The development of a demonstration project together with strategic dissemination efforts will greatly facilitate the rapid adoption of MEI. Both efforts are targeted toward making scholars aware of how to get their data into MEI and of what can be done with their data afterward. Thus, the demonstration project will include basic software for transforming material into MEI, a searchable archive of representative MEI-encoded data, and a prototype delivery system for items in the archive. While the project will provide a varied and representative sampling of material for the archive, its maturation will also require an active community of scholars interested in encoding beyond the project. Our dissemination efforts – presentations at professional conferences, the provision of workshops, the formal foundation of a governing council, and a first "MEI Members Meeting" – will all contribute to the establishment and expansion of this community base. In turn, we expect that the widening community will itself begin to attract new users and trigger the development of additional tools for MEI outside this project. The potential impact of MEI on the musical scholarly community is vast. With an appropriately powerful and flexible musical notation standard in place, we will for the first time be able to support the automated processing of music data and the comprehensive storage of data for a broad range for musicological purposes. This will allow the scholarly community to overcome the limitations of today's printed editions by extending the potential of digital editions, to implement new methodological techniques for music research, and facilitate collaboration between musicologists by providing a standardized means of data interchange.

DFG Programme: Cataloguing and Digitisation (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)

International Connection: USA

Partner Organisation: National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)

Cooperation Partners: Erin Mayhood; Perry Roland