The TEI community have just set up a Special Interest Group for the encoding of music in XML (disclosure: I am one of the moderators). I forward the announcement below:
A Special Interest Group for music encoding in TEI has been created. The goal of the SIG is to examine the current possibilities for encoding both the physical representation of music and the aural common elements between different notation systems, and to decide on a preliminary recommendation/agenda for music encoding in the TEI, whether directly via adoption of new elements or by importing a recommended namespace from an existing external schema.
The discussion will deal with issues like:
- Encoding western music notation from all time periods, from ancient through modern.
- Encoding not only the music notation, but the aural aspects common to different notation systems.
- Encoding music and text together as well as music on its own.
Everyone interested is welcome to participate to our mailing list:
http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A0=TEI-MUSIC-SIG
and to our wiki:
http://www.tei-c.org/wiki/index.php/SIG:Music
It is particularly important, I think, that experts in ancient music are represented in this discussion, since many of the participants in the TEI community are mediaeval or modern manuscript scholars. There may (there surely *will*) be features of ancient music that test the limits of standards designed to encode more modern musical notations.
(Does anyone have any nice musical papyri lying around that we could encode in EpiDoc as a test of this sort of markup?)
