What is Piano Transcription?
Piano Transcription
Music transcription is the process of creating sheet music from an audio recording. This can be done either manually or using automatic software. In the case of manual piano transcription, it involves listening to a piece of music and noting down what each note is being played as it is being played. This requires a great deal of ear training, and it can be very difficult to do well. However, if you are patient and work at it, you can eventually become an expert at this art form.
The most common use of transcription is to adapt a composition for an instrument or group of instruments that it was not originally written for. This is also known as an arrangement. There are many famous examples of this in musical history, including the re-orchestration of Beethoven symphonies by Franz Liszt; Joseph Haydn’s string quartets for piano; and Mozart’s Piano Concertos for orchestra.
Another important type of transcription is to create an arrangement for a solo piano. This can be quite challenging, but it is possible to create excellent performances of complex pieces of classical music using this method. The best pianists have a great understanding of how to transcribe orchestral music for piano and can take great pride in their creations.
What is Piano Transcription?
Some commercial piano transcribing software programs can do automatic note scanning of dominant melodies in polyphonic musical recordings, and then generating music score from them. The software works by analyzing the frequency of each individual note within a chord, and then calculating the mathematically related frequencies that are necessary to reproduce that sound on the piano. This is a very accurate way to perform piano transcription, but it still requires a significant amount of ear training to use.
When working on a piano transcription, it is generally helpful to work in small chunks of music at a time. This can help to reduce the chances of missing a note or a chord, and it will also make the transcription process go more quickly. A good idea is to listen to the entire chunk of music a few times before beginning the notes, to ensure that you have a clear picture in your mind of what is being played.
Some of the challenges of piano transcription are overcoming issues of accuracy, such as determining what notes are being played, and which hands the pianist is playing them with. This requires scale degree recognition and harmonic analysis skills, as well as relative or perfect pitch. Many professional piano players use this approach to learn music from a broad range of eras and cultures, as exemplified by the recent Nonesuch album by Jeremy Denk, in which he performed transcriptions of medieval and Renaissance vocal pieces by composers such as Dufay, Machaut, Ockeghem, and Josquin. This type of transcription often reveals unexpected connections between music that seems to be from very different historical periods. This is a wonderful way to discover new dimensions in a classic piece of music.