Musique Concrète (1948)
Sampling
Pierre Schaeffer locked himself in a studio with train recordings. He rejected sheet music and synthesizers: "The material of music is sound itself." Thus was born Musique Concrète: a collage of reality, created with scissors and tape.
Full text
Schaeffer worked as an engineer and utilized the 'locked groove' (sillon fermé) technique on vinyl records even before the advent of tape recorders. These were history's first loops: the needle skipped back, endlessly repeating a fragment of a train sound.
His philosophy of 'acousmatics' called for listening to sound detached from its source. When the sound of a train is slowed down and cropped, we stop visualizing the locomotive and start hearing the rhythm, timbre, and texture. 'Musique Concrète' is the work with sound as a physical object that can be sculpted by hand.