I’m in the middle of writing a book about transcription and ear training. Broadly speaking, I think the two are essentially the same thing.

Transcription, at its core, is about the connection between listening and playing. It’s the real work we do to become more fluent as musicians. Listening, I think, is a relatively low-effort exercise since you can do it almost anywhere, while doing almost anything. On some level, the performance element of our playing could also be considered low-effort when compared to the work required to get there.