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The divide between French musique concrète and Cologne's elektronische Musik, which first emerged in the early 1950s, was still very much alive by the 1970s. On one side stood Schaeffer, concrete sounds, and reduced listening; on the other, Stockhausen's German rigor and almost obsessive commitment to synthesis. Parmegiani most likely never set out to become the peacemaker, but in De Natura Sonorum, that is precisely what happened.

De Natura Sonorum is a vast sonic canvas in two series, exploring the very nature of sound and the dialectic between the concrete, meaning sounds of the real world, and the artificial, meaning electronic sound. Parmegiani worked like an entomologist: constructing pairs, colliding recordings of strings, water droplets, or clinking kitchenware with the noise of analog synthesizers to create "impossible" sound objects. Despite having access to GRM's studio instruments, including the Coupigny synthesizer, De Natura Sonorum was crafted in the "era of scissors" through grueling manual micro-editing of magnetic tape.

The album became a classic of electroacoustic music and influenced subsequent generations. IDM figures such as Aphex Twin and Autechre have openly cited Parmegiani's work as an inspiration. His conceptual work with "sound micro-particles" and the abstraction of time helped lay the groundwork for later musical approaches and techniques, including granular synthesis.