Transcription Prelude

A short music piece for solo piano, created from the synthesized output of an automatic transcription system developed by the authors, is presented in this paper. The piece was a result of a happy accident when attempting to port the Linuxbased automatic transcription system into the Windows OS. As an input, J.S. Bach’s Prelude in C Minor from the The Well-Tempered Clavier Book I was employed, using an existing recording from the MAPS dataset. The transcribed piece, aptly named Transcription Prelude, is surprisingly different from the original input source. A frantic succession of seemingly random chords from the higher register of the piano is contrasted with a sparse melody in the lower register, whose structure challenges the audience to link it with J.S. Bach’s original prelude. The result is a 2-minute atonal piece, demonstrating future uses of music information retrieval tools in contemporary music composition and reminding that often the most important steps in the creative process stem from errors.