A standard format proposal for hierarchical analyses and representations

In the realm of digital musicology, standardizations efforts to date have mostly concentrated on the representation of music. Analyses of music are increasingly being generated or communicated by digital means. We demonstrate that the same arguments for the desirability of standardization in the representation of music apply also to the representation of analyses of music: proper preservation, sharing of data, and facilitation of digital processing. We concentrate here on analyses which can be described as hierarchical and show that this covers a broad range of existing analytical formats. We propose an extension of MEI (Music Encoding Initiative) to allow the encoding of analyses unambiguously associated with and aligned to a representation of the music analysed, making use of existing mechanisms within MEI's parent TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) for the representation of trees and graphs.