Let's Encode!
Crowd-encoding the world's music scores, one note at a time.
Let's Encode! is a citizen-science project that helps anyone turn sheet music into rich, machine-readable encodings in the MEI format — no specialist training required.
About the project
Making music readable by machines
Digital music scores are essential tools in both performance and musicology. But standard PDFs and scanned sheet music can't easily be processed by computers: musicians instantly grasp their meaning, yet the music semantics stay hidden from machines.
Let's Encode! builds infrastructure for crowd-based encoding and validation of music scores — a range of free, browser-based tools pitched at different levels of technical expertise, from the mei-friend MEI-XML editor to graphical interfaces that need no MEI knowledge at all, so the right person can use the right tool for the right task. This lets interested people take part in digitising music — without extensive technical knowledge or administrative barriers — and helps build a shared, openly reusable library of encoded music.
We've tried to remove every obstacle between you and the music you want to encode:
- Free and open source — no fees; our software is openly licensed, and you choose how your encodings are shared, with open, reuse-friendly licences recommended.
- Nothing to install — our tools run entirely in your browser, on whatever device you already have.
- You're in charge — campaigns are user-directed, so you can start and manage your own campaign as well as taking part in someone else's — all from your browser.
What we're working towards
Project goals
We investigate ways to make semantic music-encoding technologies accessible to diverse communities. Early collaborations include:
- Chamber orchestras encoding performance scores of public-domain works, reducing licensing fees and building reusable editions.
- Music societies preserving cultural heritage — lute-music archives, klezmer collections, and the work of underrepresented composers.
- RISM users creating melodic incipits for the Répertoire International des Sources Musicales to enrich and improve its collections.
Start or join a campaign
Soon you'll be able to launch your own encoding campaign or join one already under way — contributing encodings, validating others' work, and watching a collection come to life. We're building it now.
Keep me postedWho we are
Team
- David M. Weigl (P.I.) Department of Music Acoustics – Wiener Klangstil, mdw
- Julia Jaklin (R.A.) Department of Music Acoustics – Wiener Klangstil, mdw
- PhD researcher Starting September 2026
- PhD researcher Starting April 2027
Project partners
Guidance & community voices
Advisory board
Our advisory board guides the project's direction and represents the communities partnering in this research.
- Anna E. Kijas Lilly Music Library, Tufts University (USA) · Rebalancing the Music Canon
-
Christina Crowder &
Clara Byom Klezmer Institute (USA) · Klezmer Archive - David Lewis Oxford e-Research Centre & Goldsmiths, University of London (UK) · ECOLM
- Laurent Pugin RISM Digital Center (Switzerland) · RISM Online
Funding & acknowledgements
Supported by the Austrian Science Fund
We gratefully acknowledge funding by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF).
