CfP for Music Encoding Conference 2021 (Alicante, Spain)

CfP for Music Encoding Conference 2021 (Alicante, Spain)

We are pleased to announce our call for papers, posters, panels, and workshops for the Music Encoding Conference 2021.

As an important cross-disciplinary venue for all who are interested in the digital representation of music, the Music Encoding Conference is open to and brings together members from various encoding, analysis, and music research communities, including musicologists, theorists, librarians, technologists, music scholars, teachers, and students, and provides an opportunity for learning and engaging with and from each other.

The MEC 2021 will take place 25–28 May 2021 at Universidad de Alicante, Spain. It is co-sponsored with the Instituto Superior de Enseñanzas Artísticas de la Comunidad Valenciana.

Please pay attention to a revised submission process and schedule compared to previous years (see submission section below for details).

Background

Music encoding is a critical component for fields and areas of study including computational or digital musicology, digital editions, symbolic music information retrieval, digital libraries, digital pedagogy, or the wider music industry.

The Music Encoding Conference has emerged as the foremost international forum where researchers and practitioners from across these varied fields can meet and explore new developments in music encoding and its use. The Conference celebrates a multidisciplinary program, combining the latest advances from established music encodings, novel technical proposals and encoding extensions, and the presentation or evaluation of new practical applications of music encoding (e.g. in academic study, libraries, editions, pedagogy, commercial products).

Pre-conference workshops provide an opportunity to quickly engage with best practice in the community. Newcomers are encouraged to submit to the main program with articulations of the potential for music encoding in their work, highlighting strengths and weaknesses of existing approaches within this context.

Following the formal program, an unconference session fosters collaboration in the community through the meeting of Interest Groups, and self-selected discussions on hot topics that emerge during the conference. For these meetings, there are various spaces generously provided by the hosting institution on May 28. Please be in touch with conference organizers if you need to reserve these spaces. For meetings on May 26 or 27 availability can be checked upon request.

The program welcomes contributions from all those working on, or with, any music encoding. In addition, the Conference serves as a focus event for the Music Encoding Initiative community, with its annual community meeting scheduled the day following the main program. We in particular seek to broaden the scope of musical repertories considered, and to provide a welcoming, inclusive community for all who are interested in this work.

Topics

The conference welcomes contributions from all those who are developing or applying music encodings in their work and research. Topics include, but are not limited to:

•     data structures for music encoding
•     music encoding standardisation
•     music encoding interoperability / universality
•     methodologies for encoding, music editing, description and analysis
•     computational analysis of encoded music
•     rendering of symbolic music data in audio and graphical forms
•     conceptual encoding of relationships between multimodal music forms (e.g. symbolic music data, encoded text, facsimile images, audio)
•     capture, interchange, and re-purposing of musical data and metadata
•     ontologies, authority files, and linked data in music encoding and description
•     (symbolic) music information retrieval using music encoding
•     evaluation of music encodings
•     best practice in approaches to music encoding

and the use or application of music encodings in:

•     music theory and analysis
•     digital musicology and, more broadly, digital humanities
•     digital editions
•     music digital libraries
•     bibliographies and bibliographic studies
•     catalogues and collection management
•     composition
•     performance
•     teaching and learning
•     search and browsing
•     multimedia music presentation, exploration, and exhibition
•     machine learning approaches.

Submissions

MEC is working towards a submission process that facilitates access to the proceedings at about the time of the conference. Therefore, unlike previous years, all but panels or workshop submissions are expected to be full-paper submissions (8–10 pages for 20mi