Electronic music can be divided into three categories: Musique concrete, synthesizer music, and computer music. Musique concrete was the first type to be created. It involves using sounds found in nature (found sound), distorted in various ways, to create music. Live, it becomes an exercise in mixing together unexpected sounds into some sort of form while studio musique concrete uses complex tape manipulations to create the effect.
Forgive us while we follow a bit of a tangent here, but this is interesting stuff:
Born in Nancy, France in 1910, (a real Nancy-boy) Pierre Schaeffer is credited with being the inventor of music concrete. Like many of the pioneers of electronic music, Schaeffer was not a musician. He received his diploma from L’Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, and did an apprenticeship at the Radiodiffusion- Television Francaises (RTF), which led to a full time job as an engineer and broadcaster.
At RTF, Schaeffer spent months experimenting with the technology available to him. He discovered that he could lock-groove records. In other words, instead of spiraling toward the center of the record, the needle could be made to stay in one groove creating a loop. In 1948, he studied the effect of striking percussive instruments different ways. He observed that a single sound event could be characterized not only by timbre, but by attack and decay as well. On April 21 of that year, he recorded bell tones to disc using a volume control between the mic and cutter to eliminate the attack. On the 23rd, he speculated that an instrument could be created that would provide the sounds of an orchestral instrument by means of a bank of prerecorded events. (The Mellotron eventually fulfilled this prophecy.) His first official composition, Etude aux chemans de fer (“Concert for Locomotives”), was a montage of sounds recorded at the train depot in Paris. Sounds included six steam locomotives whistling, trains accelerating, and wagons passing over the joints in the tracks.
Although the composition is considered to be more of an experimental essay rather than a serious composition, it was significant in four ways.
- An act of musical composition was accomplished by a technological process.
- The work could be replayed multiple times.
- Replaying was not dependent on human performers.
- Elements were “concrete.”
Schaeffer then began to play records at different speeds. This affected not only pitch and duration, but also the amplitude envelopes of the sounds.
In 1951, Schaeffer began working with a tape recorder. This was an important event as the phonograph had been his tool for composition up to that point. One of the recorders had 5-track capability. One, known as the Morphophone, had 12 playback heads, which allowed for tape echo and a pseudo reverb effect. Two other decks known as Phonogenes, were designed to play prerecorded loops at different speeds (one came with a 12-note keyboard!).
At this time, while stereo was still in development, Schaeffer had the means of playing up to five separate tracks with five separate speakers. (MPEG-2 technology allows for five distinct outputs as used in DVD production, here we see the idea in affect almost 50 years ago). This allowed for spatial experimentation of sounds. Four speakers were used for playback. Two speakers were located in front of the stage on the left and right, one was placed directly in the back in the middle, and one was suspended from the ceiling. The ceiling speaker allowed for experimenting with vertical sound placement as well as the usual horizontal placement. The fifth track contained an additional channel spread between the four speakers that represented a performer using a handheld coil which could be positioned near one of four wire receiving loops that sent the info to each speaker.
Schaeffer died in 1995 from Alzheimer disease. He was remembered as the ‘Musician of Sounds.’
“Unfortunately it took me forty years to conclude that nothing is possible outside Do-Re-Mi. I think of myself as an explorer struggling to find a way through in the far north, but I wasn’t finding a way through. There is no way through. The way through is behind us.” – Pierre Schaeffer
