What is Transcription (music)?
{{about|music|other uses|Transcription (disambiguation)}} A musical '''transcription''' is [[musical notation]] for an existing piece of music that had been previously unnotated.<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Klapuri|first=Anssi|date=20 Dec 2006|title=Introduction to Music Transcription|journal=Signal Processing Methods for Music Transcription|publisher=Tampere University of Technology|volume=|pages=3–20|doi=10.1007/0-387-32845-9_1|isbn=978-0-387-30667-4|s2cid=15504328}}</ref> Musicians often disagree about what should be called a “transcription” and what is an “arrangement”.<ref>New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, edited Stanley Sadie; London 1980; vol 1 p.626</ref> Usually transcriptions are a direct notation of the source, whereas a musician who makes an arrangement may insert new interpretations into the music (i.e. changing the instrumentation, reharmonization, or even new sectionalization of the piece as with [[Cover song|cover songs]]). A transcription, as Klapuri writes, would require that the pitch, timing, and instrumentation of all sound events to be resolved; difficult as this may be for some cases, this goal is usually redefined such that a transcription constitutes the notation of as many of the constituent sounds as possible or some well-defined part of the music signal (i.e. the dominant melody or the most prominent drum sounds). Transcriptions can be created for all kinds of music in order to help the performer to learn the piece. Transcriptions are common for music such as [[jazz]] (which usually consists of [[improvisation]]) and [[folk music|folk]], which traditionally is taught from one [[generation]] to another by listening and imitating. In the early [[20th century]], some composers became interested in writing down the traditional folk songs of their countries. [[Béla Bartók]] and [[Zoltan Kodaly]] in [[Hungary]] as well as [[Cecil Sharpe]] and [[Ralph Vaughan Williams]] in [[England]] notably transcribed various folk songs they heard being sung in the villages of their respective co