Traités français sur la musique (TFM) is an evolving archive of writings in the French language on music. It is designed to extend the Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum (TML) and to continue the endeavor of capturing Western European texts on music theory and aesthetics in electronic form. The TFM focuses on the major treatises written in French but also incorporates other texts involving music, allowing them to be browsed and searched. The TFM will eventually comprise all relevant manuscript and printed materials from the Middle Ages through the nineteenth century. The development of the TFM is being undertaken at Indiana University, where the Jacobs School of Music Center for the History of Music Theory and Literature (CHMTL) provides editorial and technical support, server space, and website hosting.

The TFM was initiated by Peter Slemon at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, and it is still maintained at the Center for the History of Music Theory and Literature.

For most treatises the TFM provides both text and graphic files.

As for the verbal text, treatises are transcribed using the 256 ASCII character set, and orthography follows exactly that of the source, even if a word is obviously misspelled. Abbreviations are expanded where possible, maintaining the regular spellings of the particular text. Pagination or foliation of the source is indicated in square brackets (except when a word is hyphenated across a page break, in which case it appears at the end of the word). Bibliographic information is included at the beginning of each file, as well as in the TFM Canon.

Writings on music include abundant figures and musical notation for which no ASCII equivalents exist. Musical notation included within sentences is entered as codes in the text file, for which please see "Principles of Orthography and Encoding for Traités français sur la musique."

Full musical examples or figures are scanned and saved in GIF format and available from hyperlinks within the text. If the example includes any text, this is added to the text file within brackets (e.g. [Rameau, Observations, 47; text: Exemple. Proportion Harmonique. Proportion Arithmétique. Tierce au dessus.]), thereby enabling searches for text strings that appear within figures as well as those within the treatise proper.

In addition to the text and graphics files the TFM Canon provides full bibliographic information and metadata for each treatise. Each entry in the Canon includes the following fields: the name of the author of the treatise, as given in the source from which the data was taken; the author's first name; the title of the treatise; the incipit; the source of the data file; the names of the persons responsible for entering, checking, and approving the data; the filename; the filetype; the filelist; the size of the file in kilobytes; annotations; and the type of source (i.e., manuscript or print). The latest version of the TFM Canon is available as a PDF by clicking here.