Transcription as musical interaction
Transcription requires an intense personal engagement with a musical composition. Typically it involves listening to the song dozens, maybe hundreds of times, working in distraction-free environments, ideally with high-quality audio equipment. It involves making choices about what information to leave in and what to omit, and how to transmit that information clearly to readers. The researcher is engaging with the musicians responsible for creating the song, be they composers, performers, and/or dancers. They may be making the transcription for personal use or for wider dissemination via publication. In the latter case, they are engaging not only with the musicians who created the song, but also those who will later interact with the transcription. In this section, I explore the implications of transcription as musical interaction, inspired by Schuiling’s assertion that notation is an “interface for imagining virtual musical relations” (Schuiling 432).
The process of transcription is often described as a way to access “the music itself”; that is, the pitches and rhythms independent of the social and cultural conditions that gave rise to them. In conversation with Jason Stanyek, Michael Tenzer relates: “I feel that transcription is honest knowledge because it’s just music with no critical or ideological overlay or anything like [that]” and in that same conversation, Tara Browner says she tells her students that when you’re transcribing, “you’re engaging with the music itself” (Stanyek 114). Transcribing rap music represents an extractive process, one that severs the music’s connections to its original creators and facilitates its commodification: in a sense it’s a microcosm of the disentangling of the four elements of hip hop. It is important to consider the racial dynamics of this way of thinking. Considering that rap historically has been music by and for people of color, to have white scholars (who may or may not be considered culture bearers) convert the music into a notation system designed for a very different kind of music is to erase the political and cultural situation from which the music emerged, which is largely predicated on racism. (And this of course is true for many kinds of music from around the world, not just rap). If whiteness is that which goes unnoticed, or unmentioned, the process of transcription in some cases whitewashes the music under consideration.
As with any interactions, our biases can creep in. Transcriptions are shaped by our knowledge of a particular style. Ethnomusicologist Nazir Jairazbhoy reminds us that “our ‘hearing’ is influenced by very specific memories, as well as musical syntax” (cited in Winkler 193). Ethnomusicologist Bruno Nettl says that transcription “gives readers an accurate idea of the specific sound of a song only if they already know in general the kind of sound to be expected, if they are already acquainted with the style” (Nettl 78). Yet any notation system has its biases, and the choice to use one notation system or another, or to develop an entirely new one not only reveals biases in the researcher but also can influence how we hear and understand what is being represented. The system’s biases have the potential to highlight elements of the music that may not be a foundational part of the genre’s aesthetic while simultaneously obscuring crucial elements of the style (and this can be good or bad). Our system of Western staff notation privileges pitch and rhythm in particular ways. Other elements of music like dynamics—the relative softness or loudness of music—and timbre can only be “crudely” approximated in this system (Winkler 192). Certain key elements of rap, such as ad-libs, or the foregrounded sounds of technological mediation referenced above, like record pops and hisses, simply cannot be adequately represented in western staff notation. Does this mean they are not important? Not musical?