SIG:Music:Meeting2009

TEI Music SIG Business Meeting November 14, 2009, Ann Arbor
The business meeting will take place in the Library Information Technology conference room (room 300, Hatcher Graduate Library North) from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m on saturday, November 14. See http://www.lib.umich.edu/spo/teimeeting09/program.html for the conference program.

Report of the meeting

The focus of this year's meeting was on reporting the aims and the status of ongoing work. In addition to this meeting, these were also topics of informal talks throughout the entire conference.

The SIG's decision to focus on MEI first led to discussion of the current status of the "ODDification" of MEI and the related question of how to combine MEI and TEI. Whether to subsume MEI into TEI, keep them separate, or adopt a process somewhere between these poles remains an open question. This question was discussed not only in a technical sense of how to combine the schemas and namespaces, but also on a political level with regard to how both the text and music markup communities can mutually benefit.

A first step towards documentation of MEI is in progress, too. As part of the DFG/NEH-funded project "Digital Music Notation Data Model and Prototype Delivery System", a list of problems concerning the encoding of music notation alone as well as in combination with text is currently under discussion. Potential solutions to these problems will be documented and illustrative examples will be encoded, which will be helpful for the SIG's work.

Finally, a significant announcement was made at the meeting. As a sub-part of the German TextGrid project, a music notation editor will be developed. While in-depth TEI support is not on the agenda of this effort, the software's underlaying data format will be MEI, so that hopefully the possibility to create, edit, and display MEI-encoded music will come to fruition soon.