- This article is about music. For other uses, see Transcription (disambiguation)
In
music,
transcription can mean
notating a piece or a sound which was previously unnotated, as, for example, an improvised jazz solo. When a musician is tasked with creating
sheet music from a recording and they write down the notes that make up the song in
music notation, it is said that they created a
musical transcription of that recording. Transcription may also mean rewriting a piece of music, either solo or
ensemble, for another instrument or other instruments than which it was originally intended. The
Beethoven Symphonies by
Franz Liszt are a good example. Transcription in this sense is sometimes called
arrangement, although strictly speaking transcriptions are faithful adaptations, whereas arrangements change significant aspects of the original piece. Further examples of music transcription include
ethnomusicological notation of
oral traditions of folk music, such as
Béla Bartók's and
Ralph Vaughan Williams' collections of the national folk music of
Hungary and
England respectively. The
French composer Olivier Messiaen transcribed
birdsong in the wild, and incorporated it into many of his compositions, for example his
Catalogue d'oiseaux for solo piano. Transcription of this nature involves scale degree recognition and harmonic analysis, both of which the transcriber will need
relative or
perfect pitch to perform.
