Digital Music Notation Data Model and Prototype Delivery System

FAIN: HG-50014-10

University of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA 22903-4833)
Erin L. Mayhood (Project Director: October 2009 to November 2012)
Lucie W. Stylianopoulos (Project Director: November 2012 to May 2014)

An international collaboration between the University of Virginia and the University of Paderborn to develop the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) demonstration project in order to establish an open source, non-proprietary academic encoding standard for music notation.

The UVa Library requests $161,175 in outright funds from NEH to collaborate with the University of Paderborn in Detmold, Germany, 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 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. This will allow the scholarly community to overcome the limitations of today's printed editions by extending the potential of digital editions, implementing new methodological techniques for music research, and facilitating collaboration between musicologists.