Transcription (music)
Encyclopedia
In music
, transcription can mean notating
a piece or a sound which was previously unnotated, as, for example, an improvised jazz solo. Further examples include ethnomusicological
notation of oral tradition
s 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 interval recognition and harmonic analysis, both of which the transcriber will need relative
or perfect pitch to perform.
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.
In popular music and rock, there are two forms of transcription. Individual performers copy a note-for-note guitar solo or other melodic line. As well, music publishers transcribe entire recordings of guitar solos and bass lines and sell the sheet music in bound books. Music publishers also publish PVG (piano/vocal/guitar) transcriptions of popular music, where the melody line is transcribed, and then the accompaniment on the recording is arranged as a piano part. The guitar aspect of the PVG label is achieved through guitar chords written above the melody. Lyrics are also included below the melody.
's arrangement for orchestra of Mussorgsky
's piano piece Pictures at an Exhibition
. Webern
used his transcription for orchestra of the six-part ricercar
from Bach
's The Musical Offering
to analyze the structure of the Bach piece, by using different instruments to play different subordinate motifs
of Bach's themes and melodies.
In transcription of this form, the new piece can simultaneously imitate the original sounds while recomposing them with all the technical skills of an expert composer in such a way that it seems that the piece was originally written for the new medium. But some transcriptions and arrangements have been done for purely pragmatic or contextual reasons. For example, in Mozart
's time, the overtures and songs from his popular operas were transcribed for small wind ensemble simply because such ensembles were common ways of providing popular entertainment in public places. Mozart himself did this in his opera Don Giovanni
, transcribing for small wind ensemble several arias from other operas, including one from his own opera The Marriage of Figaro
. A more contemporary example is Stravinsky
´s transcription for four hands piano of The Rite of Spring
, to be used on the ballet's rehearsals. Today musicians who play in cafes or restaurants will sometimes play transcriptions or arrangements of pieces written for a larger group of instruments.
Other examples of this type of transcription include Bach
's arrangement of Vivaldi
's four-violin concerti for four keyboard instruments and orchestra; Mozart's arrangement of some Bach fugue
s from The Well-Tempered Clavier
for string trio
; Beethoven's
arrangement of his Große Fuge
, originally written for string quartet
, for piano
duet, and his arrangement of his Violin Concerto
as a piano concerto
; Franz Liszt
's piano arrangements of the works of many composers, including the symphonies of Beethoven
; Tchaikovsky
's arrangement of four Mozart piano pieces into an orchestral suite called "Mozartiana"; Mahler
's re-orchestration of Schumann
symphonies; and Schoenberg
's arrangement for orchestra of Brahms
's piano quintet and Bach's "St. Anne" Prelude and Fugue for organ.
Since the piano became a popular instrument, a large literature has sprung up of transcriptions and arrangements for piano of works for orchestra or chamber music ensemble. These are sometimes called piano "piano reduction
s", because the multiplicity of orchestral parts—in an orchestral piece there may be as many as two dozen separate instrumental parts being played simultaneously—has to be reduced to what a single pianist (or occasionally two pianists, on one or two pianos, such as the different arrangements for George Gershwin
's Rhapsody in Blue
) can manage to play.
.
To transcribe music automatically, several problems must be solved:
1. Notes must be recognized - this is typically done by changing from the time domain into the frequency domain. This can be accomplished through the Fourier transform
. Computer algorithms for doing this are common. The Fast Fourier transform
algorithm computes the frequency content of a signal, and is useful in processing musical excerpts.
2. A beat and tempo need to be detected (Beat detection
)- this is a difficult, many-faceted problem.
The method proposed in Costantini et al. 2009 focuses on note events and their main characteristics: the attack instant, the pitch and the final instant. Onset detection exploits a binary time-frequency representation of the audio signal. Note classification and offset detection are based on constant Q transform
(CQT) and support vector machines (SVMs). An audio example can be found here.
Software designed to slow down the tempo of music without changing the pitch of the music can be very helpful for recognizing pitches, melodies, chords, rhythms and lyrics when transcribing music. The software generally goes through a two-step process to accomplish this. First, the audio file is played back at a lower sample rate than that of the original file. This has the same effect as playing a tape or vinyl record at slower speed - the pitch is lowered meaning the music can sound like it is in a different key. The second step is to use Digital Signal Processing (or DSP)
to shift the pitch back up to the original pitch level or musical key.
Music
Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch , rhythm , dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture...
, transcription can mean notating
Musical notation
Music notation or musical notation is any system that represents aurally perceived music, through the use of written symbols.-History:...
a piece or a sound which was previously unnotated, as, for example, an improvised jazz solo. Further examples include ethnomusicological
Ethnomusicology
Ethnomusicology is defined as "the study of social and cultural aspects of music and dance in local and global contexts."Coined by the musician Jaap Kunst from the Greek words ἔθνος ethnos and μουσική mousike , it is often considered the anthropology or ethnography of music...
notation of oral tradition
Oral tradition
Oral tradition and oral lore is cultural material and traditions transmitted orally from one generation to another. The messages or testimony are verbally transmitted in speech or song and may take the form, for example, of folktales, sayings, ballads, songs, or chants...
s of folk music, such as Béla Bartók
Béla Bartók
Béla Viktor János Bartók was a Hungarian composer and pianist. He is considered one of the most important composers of the 20th century and is regarded, along with Liszt, as Hungary's greatest composer...
's and Ralph Vaughan Williams
Ralph Vaughan Williams
Ralph Vaughan Williams OM was an English composer of symphonies, chamber music, opera, choral music, and film scores. He was also a collector of English folk music and song: this activity both influenced his editorial approach to the English Hymnal, beginning in 1904, in which he included many...
' collections of the national folk music of Hungary
Hungary
Hungary , officially the Republic of Hungary , is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is situated in the Carpathian Basin and is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine and Romania to the east, Serbia and Croatia to the south, Slovenia to the southwest and Austria to the west. The...
and England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
respectively. The French
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
composer
Composer
A composer is a person who creates music, either by musical notation or oral tradition, for interpretation and performance, or through direct manipulation of sonic material through electronic media...
Olivier Messiaen
Olivier Messiaen
Olivier Messiaen was a French composer, organist and ornithologist, one of the major composers of the 20th century. His music is rhythmically complex ; harmonically and melodically it is based on modes of limited transposition, which he abstracted from his early compositions and improvisations...
transcribed birdsong
Bird song
Bird vocalization includes both bird calls and bird songs. In non-technical use, bird songs are the bird sounds that are melodious to the human ear. In ornithology and birding, songs are distinguished by function from calls.-Definition:The distinction between songs and calls is based upon...
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 interval recognition and harmonic analysis, both of which the transcriber will need relative
Relative pitch
The term relative pitch may denote:* the distance of a musical note from a set point of reference, e.g. "three octaves above middle C"* a musician's ability to identify the intervals between given tones, regardless of their relation to concert pitch * the skill used by singers to correctly sing a...
or perfect pitch to perform.
Transcription may also mean rewriting a piece of music, either solo or ensemble
Musical ensemble
A musical ensemble is a group of people who perform instrumental or vocal music. In classical music, trios or quartets either blend the sounds of musical instrument families or group together instruments from the same instrument family, such as string ensembles or wind ensembles...
, for another instrument or other instruments than which it was originally intended. The Beethoven Symphonies
Beethoven Symphonies (Liszt)
Beethoven Symphonies , S.464, is a set of nine transcriptions for solo piano by Franz Liszt of Ludwig van Beethoven's symphonies.-History:Liszt began the work in 1838, but at that time only completed the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Symphonies, of which the Fifth and Sixth were published by Breitkopf &...
by Franz Liszt
Franz Liszt
Franz Liszt ; ), was a 19th-century Hungarian composer, pianist, conductor, and teacher.Liszt became renowned in Europe during the nineteenth century for his virtuosic skill as a pianist. He was said by his contemporaries to have been the most technically advanced pianist of his age...
are a good example. Transcription in this sense is sometimes called arrangement
Arrangement
The American Federation of Musicians defines arranging as "the art of preparing and adapting an already written composition for presentation in other than its original form. An arrangement may include reharmonization, paraphrasing, and/or development of a composition, so that it fully represents...
, although strictly speaking transcriptions are faithful adaptations, whereas arrangements change significant aspects of the original piece.
In popular music and rock, there are two forms of transcription. Individual performers copy a note-for-note guitar solo or other melodic line. As well, music publishers transcribe entire recordings of guitar solos and bass lines and sell the sheet music in bound books. Music publishers also publish PVG (piano/vocal/guitar) transcriptions of popular music, where the melody line is transcribed, and then the accompaniment on the recording is arranged as a piano part. The guitar aspect of the PVG label is achieved through guitar chords written above the melody. Lyrics are also included below the melody.
Adaptation
Some composers have rendered homage to other composers by creating "identical" versions of the earlier composers' pieces while adding their own creativity through the use of completely new sounds arising from the difference in instrumentation. The most widely known example of this is RavelMaurice Ravel
Joseph-Maurice Ravel was a French composer known especially for his melodies, orchestral and instrumental textures and effects...
's arrangement for orchestra of Mussorgsky
Modest Mussorgsky
Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky was a Russian composer, one of the group known as 'The Five'. He was an innovator of Russian music in the romantic period...
's piano piece Pictures at an Exhibition
Pictures at an Exhibition
Pictures at an Exhibition is a suite in ten movements composed for piano by Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky in 1874.The suite is Mussorgsky's most famous piano composition, and has become a showpiece for virtuoso pianists...
. Webern
Anton Webern
Anton Webern was an Austrian composer and conductor. He was a member of the Second Viennese School. As a student and significant follower of Arnold Schoenberg, he became one of the best-known exponents of the twelve-tone technique; in addition, his innovations regarding schematic organization of...
used his transcription for orchestra of the six-part ricercar
Ricercar
A ricercar is a type of late Renaissance and mostly early Baroque instrumental composition. The term means to search out, and many ricercars serve a preludial function to "search out" the key or mode of a following piece...
from Bach
Johann Sebastian Bach
Johann Sebastian Bach was a German composer, organist, harpsichordist, violist, and violinist whose sacred and secular works for choir, orchestra, and solo instruments drew together the strands of the Baroque period and brought it to its ultimate maturity...
's The Musical Offering
The Musical Offering
The Musical Offering , BWV 1079, is a collection of canons and fugues and other pieces of music by Johann Sebastian Bach, all based on a single musical theme given to him by Frederick II of Prussia , to whom they are dedicated...
to analyze the structure of the Bach piece, by using different instruments to play different subordinate motifs
Motif (music)
In music, a motif or motive is a short musical idea, a salient recurring figure, musical fragment or succession of notes that has some special importance in or is characteristic of a composition....
of Bach's themes and melodies.
In transcription of this form, the new piece can simultaneously imitate the original sounds while recomposing them with all the technical skills of an expert composer in such a way that it seems that the piece was originally written for the new medium. But some transcriptions and arrangements have been done for purely pragmatic or contextual reasons. For example, in Mozart
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart , baptismal name Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart , was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical era. He composed over 600 works, many acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, concertante, chamber, piano, operatic, and choral music...
's time, the overtures and songs from his popular operas were transcribed for small wind ensemble simply because such ensembles were common ways of providing popular entertainment in public places. Mozart himself did this in his opera Don Giovanni
Don Giovanni
Don Giovanni is an opera in two acts with music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and with an Italian libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte. It was premiered by the Prague Italian opera at the Teatro di Praga on October 29, 1787...
, transcribing for small wind ensemble several arias from other operas, including one from his own opera The Marriage of Figaro
The Marriage of Figaro
Le nozze di Figaro, ossia la folle giornata , K. 492, is an opera buffa composed in 1786 in four acts by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, with Italian libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte, based on a stage comedy by Pierre Beaumarchais, La folle journée, ou le Mariage de Figaro .Although the play by...
. A more contemporary example is Stravinsky
Igor Stravinsky
Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky ; 6 April 1971) was a Russian, later naturalized French, and then naturalized American composer, pianist, and conductor....
´s transcription for four hands piano of The Rite of Spring
The Rite of Spring
The Rite of Spring, original French title Le sacre du printemps , is a ballet with music by Igor Stravinsky; choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky; and concept, set design and costumes by Nicholas Roerich...
, to be used on the ballet's rehearsals. Today musicians who play in cafes or restaurants will sometimes play transcriptions or arrangements of pieces written for a larger group of instruments.
Other examples of this type of transcription include Bach
Johann Sebastian Bach
Johann Sebastian Bach was a German composer, organist, harpsichordist, violist, and violinist whose sacred and secular works for choir, orchestra, and solo instruments drew together the strands of the Baroque period and brought it to its ultimate maturity...
's arrangement of Vivaldi
Antonio Vivaldi
Antonio Lucio Vivaldi , nicknamed because of his red hair, was an Italian Baroque composer, priest, and virtuoso violinist, born in Venice. Vivaldi is recognized as one of the greatest Baroque composers, and his influence during his lifetime was widespread over Europe...
's four-violin concerti for four keyboard instruments and orchestra; Mozart's arrangement of some Bach fugue
Fugue
In music, a fugue is a compositional technique in two or more voices, built on a subject that is introduced at the beginning in imitation and recurs frequently in the course of the composition....
s from The Well-Tempered Clavier
The Well-Tempered Clavier
The Well-Tempered Clavier , BWV 846–893, is a collection of solo keyboard music composed by Johann Sebastian Bach...
for string trio
Trio (music)
Trio is generally used in any of the following ways:* A group of three musicians playing the same or different musical instrument.* The performance of a piece of music by three people.* The contrasting section of a piece in ternary form...
; Beethoven's
Ludwig van Beethoven
Ludwig van Beethoven was a German composer and pianist. A crucial figure in the transition between the Classical and Romantic eras in Western art music, he remains one of the most famous and influential composers of all time.Born in Bonn, then the capital of the Electorate of Cologne and part of...
arrangement of his Große Fuge
Große Fuge
The Große Fuge , Op. 133, is a single-movement composition for string quartet by Ludwig van Beethoven. A massive double fugue, it originally served as the final movement of his Quartet No. 13 in B major but he replaced it with a new finale and published it separately in 1827 as Op...
, originally written for string quartet
String quartet
A string quartet is a musical ensemble of four string players – usually two violin players, a violist and a cellist – or a piece written to be performed by such a group...
, for piano
Piano
The piano is a musical instrument played by means of a keyboard. It is one of the most popular instruments in the world. Widely used in classical and jazz music for solo performances, ensemble use, chamber music and accompaniment, the piano is also very popular as an aid to composing and rehearsal...
duet, and his arrangement of his Violin Concerto
Violin Concerto (Beethoven)
Ludwig van Beethoven's Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 61, was written in 1806.The work was premiered on 23 December 1806 in the Theater an der Wien in Vienna. Beethoven wrote the concerto for his colleague Franz Clement, a leading violinist of the day, who had earlier given him helpful advice on...
as a piano concerto
Piano concerto
A piano concerto is a concerto written for piano and orchestra.See also harpsichord concerto; some of these works are occasionally played on piano...
; Franz Liszt
Franz Liszt
Franz Liszt ; ), was a 19th-century Hungarian composer, pianist, conductor, and teacher.Liszt became renowned in Europe during the nineteenth century for his virtuosic skill as a pianist. He was said by his contemporaries to have been the most technically advanced pianist of his age...
's piano arrangements of the works of many composers, including the symphonies of Beethoven
Beethoven Symphonies (Liszt)
Beethoven Symphonies , S.464, is a set of nine transcriptions for solo piano by Franz Liszt of Ludwig van Beethoven's symphonies.-History:Liszt began the work in 1838, but at that time only completed the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Symphonies, of which the Fifth and Sixth were published by Breitkopf &...
; Tchaikovsky
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (Russian: Пётр Ильи́ч Чайко́вский ; often "Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky" in English. His names are also transliterated "Piotr" or "Petr"; "Ilitsch", "Il'ich" or "Illyich"; and "Tschaikowski", "Tschaikowsky", "Chajkovskij"...
's arrangement of four Mozart piano pieces into an orchestral suite called "Mozartiana"; Mahler
Gustav Mahler
Gustav Mahler was a late-Romantic Austrian composer and one of the leading conductors of his generation. He was born in the village of Kalischt, Bohemia, in what was then Austria-Hungary, now Kaliště in the Czech Republic...
's re-orchestration of Schumann
Robert Schumann
Robert Schumann, sometimes known as Robert Alexander Schumann, was a German composer, aesthete and influential music critic. He is regarded as one of the greatest and most representative composers of the Romantic era....
symphonies; and Schoenberg
Arnold Schoenberg
Arnold Schoenberg was an Austrian composer, associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader of the Second Viennese School...
's arrangement for orchestra of Brahms
Johannes Brahms
Johannes Brahms was a German composer and pianist, and one of the leading musicians of the Romantic period. Born in Hamburg, Brahms spent much of his professional life in Vienna, Austria, where he was a leader of the musical scene...
's piano quintet and Bach's "St. Anne" Prelude and Fugue for organ.
Since the piano became a popular instrument, a large literature has sprung up of transcriptions and arrangements for piano of works for orchestra or chamber music ensemble. These are sometimes called piano "piano reduction
Piano reduction
A piano reduction is sheet music for the piano that was once music for other instruments that was reduced to its most basic components within a two line staff for piano. It is also considered a style of orchestration or music arrangement less well known as contraction scoring, a subset of elastic...
s", because the multiplicity of orchestral parts—in an orchestral piece there may be as many as two dozen separate instrumental parts being played simultaneously—has to be reduced to what a single pianist (or occasionally two pianists, on one or two pianos, such as the different arrangements for George Gershwin
George Gershwin
George Gershwin was an American composer and pianist. Gershwin's compositions spanned both popular and classical genres, and his most popular melodies are widely known...
's Rhapsody in Blue
Rhapsody in Blue
Rhapsody in Blue is a musical composition by George Gershwin for solo piano and jazz band written in 1924, which combines elements of classical music with jazz-influenced effects....
) can manage to play.
Automatic transcription
Several attempts have been made at automatic transcription of music, most of which have qualified for someone's Master's or PhD thesis. However, a collection of the tools created by this ongoing research could be of great aid to musicians. In general, musical recordings are sampled at a given recording rate and its frequency data is stored in any digital wave format in the computer. Such format represents sound by digital samplingSampling (signal processing)
In signal processing, sampling is the reduction of a continuous signal to a discrete signal. A common example is the conversion of a sound wave to a sequence of samples ....
.
To transcribe music automatically, several problems must be solved:
1. Notes must be recognized - this is typically done by changing from the time domain into the frequency domain. This can be accomplished through the Fourier transform
Fourier transform
In mathematics, Fourier analysis is a subject area which grew from the study of Fourier series. The subject began with the study of the way general functions may be represented by sums of simpler trigonometric functions...
. Computer algorithms for doing this are common. The Fast Fourier transform
Fast Fourier transform
A fast Fourier transform is an efficient algorithm to compute the discrete Fourier transform and its inverse. "The FFT has been called the most important numerical algorithm of our lifetime ." There are many distinct FFT algorithms involving a wide range of mathematics, from simple...
algorithm computes the frequency content of a signal, and is useful in processing musical excerpts.
2. A beat and tempo need to be detected (Beat detection
Beat detection
In signal analysis, beat detection is using computer software or computer hardware to detect the beat of a musical score. There are many methods available and beat detection is always a tradeoff between accuracy and speed. Beat detectors are common in music visualization software such as some media...
)- this is a difficult, many-faceted problem.
The method proposed in Costantini et al. 2009 focuses on note events and their main characteristics: the attack instant, the pitch and the final instant. Onset detection exploits a binary time-frequency representation of the audio signal. Note classification and offset detection are based on constant Q transform
Constant Q transform
In mathematics and signal processing, the Constant Q Transform transforms a data series to the frequency domain, and is related to the Fourier Transform ....
(CQT) and support vector machines (SVMs). An audio example can be found here.
Transcription aids
Prior to the invention of digital transcription aids, musicians would slow down a record or a tape recording to be able to hear the melodic lines and chords. The problem with this approach is it also changed the pitches, so once a piece was transcribed, it would then have to be transposed into the correct key.Software designed to slow down the tempo of music without changing the pitch of the music can be very helpful for recognizing pitches, melodies, chords, rhythms and lyrics when transcribing music. The software generally goes through a two-step process to accomplish this. First, the audio file is played back at a lower sample rate than that of the original file. This has the same effect as playing a tape or vinyl record at slower speed - the pitch is lowered meaning the music can sound like it is in a different key. The second step is to use Digital Signal Processing (or DSP)
Digital signal processing
Digital signal processing is concerned with the representation of discrete time signals by a sequence of numbers or symbols and the processing of these signals. Digital signal processing and analog signal processing are subfields of signal processing...
to shift the pitch back up to the original pitch level or musical key.
See also
- OrchestrationOrchestrationOrchestration is the study or practice of writing music for an orchestra or of adapting for orchestra music composed for another medium...
- TimbreTimbreIn music, timbre is the quality of a musical note or sound or tone that distinguishes different types of sound production, such as voices and musical instruments, such as string instruments, wind instruments, and percussion instruments. The physical characteristics of sound that determine the...
- Composer tributes (classical music)Composer tributes (classical music)Musical tributes or homages from one composer to another can take many forms. Following are examples of the major types of tributes occurring in classical music. Note that a particular work may fit into more than one of these types.-Variations:...