To transfer / scribe something that you have heard. Just like a “transcript” is the written record of spoken words, transcription is the act of transferring something heads into written form.
Transcription is a valued skill among musicians. The ability to hear a piece of music and write it down can be more than a little more difficult than transcribing speech.
Not sure if apocryphal, but Mozart is known an expert transcriber, able to hear an orchestral work and write down all the different instruments as they played their parts on just one listen.
Seems conceivable. I remember a friend in high school band camp with a cassette player and a stack of manuscript paper who transcribed a Chicago song by playing a couple seconds of it, writing down all the parts and then playing the next couple seconds. I really wish I'd understood back then that this was a learnable skill. It wasn't until I was in my 30s and had a few years of choral singing under my belt that I began to develop some simulacrum of that ability.
Transcription is a valued skill among musicians. The ability to hear a piece of music and write it down can be more than a little more difficult than transcribing speech.
Not sure if apocryphal, but Mozart is known an expert transcriber, able to hear an orchestral work and write down all the different instruments as they played their parts on just one listen.