Proposal of a theoretical framework for music information representation Introduction. Music Information Retrieval (MIR) is a multidisciplinary research field that seeks to develop management mechanisms, access and use of music collections (Downie 2004). The relation between the representation and the retrieval of information is one of the key-concepts of the research on information retrieval systems. Intended to contribute in the construction of a referential in this subject, the present research aims to structure a wide metadata elements set for the representation of music information. Method. The research is exploratory and the method utilized was bibliographical and documental research in documents published between 2003 and 2012. The metadata was gathered from the following sources: proceedings of the ISMIR, ARIST, proceedings of the ENANCIB, W3C and JISC. Analysis. The documents went through to a qualitative content analysis, following the steps structured by Bardin (1994). Results. The result was a wide set of 47 metadata elements for the representation of music information, including authoring, technical and sound aspects, among others. Conclusion. The representation of music information involves the description of different aspects, therefore, the extraction of the document information requires an extra knowledge on music structure and theory, in addition to the knowledge of the Library Science area professionals. The appliance of the metadata elements set proposed in a specific informative service context can demonstrate the need for some adaption. For this reason, we emphasize that the table is intended to be a reference.