Musique concrète was born in a Paris radio studio when engineer and composer Pierre Schaeffer began editing and processing recordings of real sounds — trains, bells, voices, blows. It is called “concrete” because it proceeds from concrete sonic material rather than an abstract notated score.
Its techniques — loops, speed change, reversal, tape splicing — laid the vocabulary for all subsequent electroacoustic music. Schaeffer worked alongside Pierre Henry. The movement's ideas later merged with the German “electronic music” of the Cologne studio and defined the face of the avant-garde in the second half of the 20th century.
