How does a sound recording differ from a written musical score?

A sound recording and a written musical score represent two fundamentally different approaches to capturing music.

A musical score functions through the use of symbols. It serves as a set of visual instructions that must be interpreted by a performer to be converted back into sound. Because notation is a symbolic system, it is often limited in its ability to capture every nuance of a performance, such as precise gradations of timbre or volume.123

In contrast, a music recording captures music through signals—direct physical or electronic impressions of the sound itself. Unlike a score, which requires a performer to bridge the gap between the page and the listener, a recording reproduces the sound directly. By bypassing the need for symbolic interpretation, recordings can preserve the specific details of a performance that notation might fail to convey. While notation has historically served as an aid to memory and communication, recordings provide a permanent, reproducible physical record of the actual performance.231