Music Encoding Initiative (MEI), an editing, encoding and describing standard for musical documents in the digital environment: Characteristics, features and scope of application

Abstract

MEI is an exhaustive and extensible XML based standard for semantic markup of musical texts in the digital domain. Its versatility has made it the most consolidated standard for music editing in the academic field, in virtue of integrating resources for the representation of any work, style, or epoch. Its flexible and extensible nature, together with the inclusion of specific elements for bibliographic description, and the possibility of unitarily integrating both metadata and marked text, make it a reference for managing musical documents in the digital environment. The present work constitutes an approach to the MEI standard through the analysis of its structure, its constituent elements, and its application in the field of musical documentation management in digital archives and databases.