Verovio: A Library for Engraving MEI Music Notation into SVG

Abstract

Rendering symbolic music notation is a common component of many MIR applications, and many tools are available for this task. There is, however, a need for a tool that can natively render the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) notation encodings that are increasingly used in music research projects. In this paper, we present Verovio, a library and toolkit for rendering MEI. A significant advantage of Verovio is that it implements MEI’s structure internally, making it the best suited solution for rendering features that make MEI unique. Verovio is designed as a fast, portable, lightweight tool written in pure standard C++ with no dependencies on third-party frameworks or libraries. It can be used as a command-line rendering tool, as a library, or it can be compiled to JavaScript using the Emscripten LLVM-to-JavaScript compiler. This last option is particularly interesting because it provides a complete in-browser music MEI typesetter. The SVG output from Verovio is organized in such a way that the MEI structure is preserved as much as possible. Since every graphic in SVG is an XML element that is easily addressable, Verovio is particularly well-suited for interactive applications, especially in web browsers. Verovio is available under the GPL open-source license.