Music Encoding Initiative
lastmod 2026-11-10created 2021-03-212 edits
Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) is the name of both an open standard for describing music scores and music documents in XML and the community that maintains it. Designed with musicology research and digital archives in mind, it can express not only notes and symbols but also scholarly metadata such as differences between editions, editorial annotations, and source information. It is compared with MusicXML, which focuses on score interchange, and together with SMuFL, which lays out symbols as fonts, it forms one pillar of music notation standards.