Musique concrète (French pronunciation: [myzik kɔ̃kʁɛt]; literally, "concrete music") is a type of music made by using recorded sounds as the main material. These sounds are often changed using special techniques, such as audio processing and tape editing, and are then arranged into a collection of sounds, similar to a collage. The sounds can come from musical instruments, human voices, nature, or be created using electronic methods. Music in this style does not follow the usual rules of melody, harmony, rhythm, or meter. It often uses acousmatic sound, where the source of the sound is hidden or not clearly connected to what is heard.

The idea of musique concrète was first developed by French composer Pierre Schaeffer in the early 1940s. He aimed to create music based on real, recorded sounds rather than written musical notes. This approach focused on using "sound objects" (French: l'objet sonore) instead of abstract musical symbols. By the 1950s, musique concrète was compared to "pure" electronic music from West Germany, which used only electronically made sounds instead of recorded ones. Over time, the difference between these two styles became less clear, and the term "electronic music" now includes both. Schaeffer's work led to the creation of France's Groupe de Recherches de Musique Concrète (GRMC), which brought together important musicians like Pierre Henry, Luc Ferrari, Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Edgard Varèse, and Iannis Xenakis. Starting in the late 1960s, especially in France, the term "acousmatic music" (French: musique acousmatique) was used to describe music that combined techniques from musique concrète with live sound movement in space.

History

In 1928, music critic André Cœuroy wrote in his book Panorama of Contemporary Music that "perhaps the time is not far off when a composer will be able to represent through recording, music specifically composed for the gramophone." Around the same time, American composer Henry Cowell, when discussing the work of Nikolai Lopatnikoff, believed that "there was a wide field open for the composition of music for phonographic discs." This idea was later repeated in 1930 by Igor Stravinsky, who wrote in the magazine Kultur und Schallplatte that "there will be a greater interest in creating music in a way that will be peculiar to the gramophone record." In 1931, Boris de Schloezer said that music could be written for the gramophone or radio just as it is written for the piano or violin. In 1936, German art theorist Rudolf Arnheim wrote about the effects of microphonic recording in an essay titled Radio. He suggested that the recording medium could have a creative role, stating that "the rediscovery of the musicality of sound in noise and in language, and the reunification of music, noise and language in order to obtain a unity of material: that is one of the chief artistic tasks of radio."

Early examples of work that influenced musique concrète include Walter Ruttmann’s film Weekend (1930), which used recordings of environmental sounds to represent the sounds of Berlin, two decades before musique concrète was formally developed. Ruttmann’s soundtrack is now considered an early form of musique concrète. Seth Kim-Cohen noted that this work was the first to "organise 'concrete' sounds into a formal, artistic composition." In the 1931 film Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, composer Irwin Bazelon described a sound collage during the first transformation scene as "pre-musique concrète." In 1924, composer Ottorino Respighi’s Pines of Rome included a phonograph recording of birdsong during the third movement.

In 1942, French composer and theorist Pierre Schaeffer began exploring radiophony when he joined Jacques Copeau and his students in founding the Studio d'Essai de la Radiodiffusion Nationale. The studio originally helped the French Resistance during World War II and later broadcast the first messages from liberated Paris in 1944. At the studio, Schaeffer experimented with creative sound techniques using available technology. In 1948, Schaeffer started keeping journals about his efforts to create a "symphony of noises." These journals were published in 1952 as A la recherche d'une musique concrète. Brian Kane noted that Schaeffer was driven by "a compositional desire to construct music from concrete objects – no matter how unsatisfactory the initial results – and a theoretical desire to find a vocabulary, solfège, or method upon which to ground such music."

Schaeffer’s work was influenced by encounters with voice actors and microphone usage, as well as techniques from cinema, such as recording and montage. These methods became the foundation for musique concrète. Marc Battier noted that before Schaeffer, Jean Epstein had observed how sound recording revealed hidden aspects of listening. Epstein’s idea of a "phenomenon of an epiphanic being" through sound recording influenced Schaeffer’s concept of "reduced listening." Schaeffer later cited Epstein for using extra-musical sound material. Epstein had imagined that "through the transposition of natural sounds, it becomes possible to create chords and dissonances, melodies and symphonies of noise, which are a new and specifically cinematographic music."

In the early to mid-1940s, Egyptian composer Halim El-Dabh experimented with electroacoustic music using a wire recorder in Cairo. He recorded sounds from an ancient zaar ceremony and processed them using reverberation, echo, and re-recording at the Middle East Radio studios. The resulting composition, The Expression of Zaar, was presented in 1944 at an art gallery in Cairo. El-Dabh described his work as an attempt to uncover "the inner sound" of the recordings. Though his early work was not widely known outside Egypt, he later gained recognition at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in Manhattan in the late 1950s.

After working at the Studio d'Essai in the 1940s, Schaeffer is credited with creating the theory and practice of musique concrète. The studio was renamed Club d'Essai de la Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française in 1946, and Schaeffer wrote about the transformation of time perceived through recording. In 1948, Schaeffer officially began "research into noises" at the Club d'Essai. On October 5, 1948, his early experiments were performed in Paris. Five works for phonograph, collectively called Cinq études de bruits (Five Studies of Noises), including Étude violette (Study in Purple) and Étude aux chemins de fer (Study with Railroads), were presented.

By 1949, Schaeffer’s work was publicly known as musique concrète. He explained that the term was meant to highlight a difference from traditional music composition. Instead of writing music with symbols and relying on instruments, musique concrète focused on collecting real sounds and using their musical qualities. Pierre Henry described musique concrète as emphasizing "envelopes and forms" rather than timbre, and as a way to "render music plastic like sculpture." Schaeffer’s approach centered on using sound as a primary resource and emphasized the importance of play (jeu) in sound-based composition. The word jeu, from the verb jouer, means both "to enjoy oneself by interacting with surroundings" and "to operate a musical instrument."

By 1951, Schaeffer, composer-percussionist Pierre Henry, and sound engineer Jacques Poullin received official recognition. The Groupe de Recherches de Musique Concr

Technology

The development of musique concrète was helped by new music technology that appeared in Europe after World War II. Access to microphones, phonographs, and later magnetic tape recorders (invented in 1939 and used by Schaeffer's Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète in 1952) was supported by a partnership with the French national broadcasting organization, Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française. This allowed Schaeffer and his team to experiment with recording and tape manipulation.

In 1948, a typical radio studio had shellac record players, a shellac recorder, a mixing desk with rotating controls, mechanical reverberation units, filters, and microphones. These tools enabled composers to perform limited tasks:

• Shellac record players: Played sound forward or backward and changed speed in fixed ratios, allowing limited pitch changes.
• Shellac recorder: Recorded sounds from the mixing desk.
• Mixing desk: Mixed multiple sound sources and controlled their volume. The mixed sound was sent to the recorder and loudspeakers, and could also go to filters or reverberation units.
• Mechanical reverberation: Used metal plates or springs to create artificial reverb.
• Filters: Removed or emphasized specific sound frequencies.
• Microphones: Captured sound for recording.

Using these tools, composers developed techniques like:

• Sound transposition: Playing a sound at a different speed than it was recorded.
• Sound looping: Creating loops at specific points in a recording.
• Sound-sample extraction: Carefully isolating small sound segments from a record, as used in Symphonie pour un homme seul.
• Filtering: Removing certain frequencies to alter a sound’s character.

Tape recorders began arriving at ORTF in 1949, but they were unreliable. Despite having a tape recorder, Symphonie pour un homme seul (1950–1951) was mostly composed using shellac records. By 1950, when the tape recorders worked properly, studio techniques expanded. New methods, like continuous speed changes and precise tape editing, allowed sounds to be arranged more accurately. Tape editing replaced rough "axe-cut" joins with precise micrometric connections, enabling a new production method less reliant on performance skills. This led to "micromontage," where tiny sound fragments were edited to create new sounds or structures.

From 1951 to 1958, Schaeffer and Poullin created new tools, including a three-track tape recorder, a ten-head machine for echo loops (the morphophone), a keyboard-controlled machine for preset speeds (the chromatic phonogène), a slide-controlled machine for variable speeds (the Sareg phonogène), and a device to distribute sound across four loudspeakers (the potentiomètre d'espace).

Changing playback speed altered sound characteristics in specific ways:

• Length: Changed proportionally to the speed ratio.
• Pitch: Changed with length, also proportionally to the speed ratio.
• Attack: Became dislocated or more focused.
• Spectral energy: Changed, altering the sound’s timbre.

The phonogène was a key tool for modifying sound. Early models, like the chromatic phonogène (1953) and sliding phonogène (SAREG), allowed precise control over speed and pitch. A later version, the universal phonogène (1963), separated pitch and time changes, enabling techniques like harmonizing and time stretching, which later became common in digital technology.

A three-head tape recorder, introduced in 1952, allowed simultaneous playback of three synchronized sound sources. This was the first step toward polyphonic music in musique concrète, as seen in Olivier Messiaen’s Timbres Durées (1952).

This machine was designed to create complex music through repetition, delays, filtering, and feedback. It used a large rotating disk, 50 cm in size.

In popular music

In the 1960s, some composers, like Schaeffer, tried to make familiar sounds seem strange. Others used sounds from popular music, movies, and radio, believing that modern art should show how people live in a world filled with media. Composers such as James Tenney and Arne Mellnäs made music in the 1960s that included sounds from Elvis Presley’s songs and his own voice. Later that decade, Bernard Parmegiani created pieces called Pop'electric and Du pop a l'ane, which used parts of music styles like easy listening, dixieland, classical music, and progressive rock. Writer Simon Reynolds noted that this approach continued with musicians like Matmos, who made a piece called A Chance to Cut Is a Chance to Cure (2001) using sounds from cosmetic surgery, and John Oswald, who called his style "plunderphonics." Oswald’s work Plexure (1993) used recognizable parts of rock and pop music from 1982 to 1992.

In the 1960s, as popular music became more important in culture, many musicians borrowed ideas from avant-garde art. The Beatles used techniques like tape loops, changing the speed of recordings, and playing music backward in their song Tomorrow Never Knows (1966). Bernard Gendron said the Beatles’ use of musique concrète helped spread avant-garde art, along with Jimi Hendrix’s use of noise and feedback, Bob Dylan’s unusual lyrics, and Frank Zappa’s ironic style. Edwin Pouncey wrote that the 1960s were a time when rock music and academic music strongly influenced each other. Composers like Luciano Berio and Pierre Henry noticed similarities between the distorted sounds of psychedelic rock and musique concrète, and they believed the contrasting tones of musique concrète matched the effects of psychedelic drugs.

After the Beatles, many groups added found sounds to their songs for a psychedelic feel, creating "pop and rock musique concrète flirtations." Examples include Summer in the City (1966) by the Lovin' Spoonful, 7 and 7 Is (1967) by Love, and The Letter (1967) by The Box Tops. Musicians with knowledge of classical and experimental music used musique concrète more skillfully, such as Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention in pieces like The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet (1966), The Chrome Planted Megaphone of Destiny (1968), and Lumpy Gravy (1968). Jefferson Airplane’s Would You Like a Snack? (1968) and The Grateful Dead’s Anthem of the Sun (1968) also included musique concrète elements. The Beatles used musique concrète in songs like Strawberry Fields Forever, Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!, and I Am the Walrus (all 1967), leading to the pure musique concrète piece Revolution 9 (1968). John Lennon and Yoko Ono continued this style in their solo works Two Virgins (1968) and Life with the Lions (1969).

Pink Floyd’s popular album The Dark Side of the Moon (1973) included musique concrète elements, such as cash register sounds in the song Money. German band Faust’s The Faust Tapes (1973), priced at 49 pence in the UK, was called one of the most widely heard pieces of musique concrète after Revolution 9. Kraftwerk’s 1975 hit Autobahn used a collage of engine sounds, horns, and traffic noise. Stephen Dalton wrote that Kraftwerk’s blend of pop and musique concrète helped them gain fame in America. Industrial bands like Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire used musique concrète techniques with tape loops, and Brian Eno’s ambient music and musique concrète collages on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1981) expanded what could be included in popular music.

When hip hop emerged in the 1980s, DJs like Grandmaster Flash used turntables to mix parts of rock, R&B, and disco records in real time, creating music with rhythmic scratching. This was similar to artist Christian Marclay’s use of vinyl records as a "noise-generating medium." Simon Reynolds wrote that as sampling technology became cheaper, DJs like Eric B. helped shape hip hop into a studio-based art. He said musique concrète moved from academic settings into street culture, becoming the music of block parties and driving. J. Niimi noted that Public Enemy’s producers, the Bomb Squad, used musique concrète techniques in their sample-based music, proving the method worked well in pop.

In 1989, John Diliberto wrote that the group Art of Noise used digital and synthesized musique concrète to create dance music for the 1980s. He said they used samplers and multitrack recording instead of tapes, as earlier composers like Schaeffer and Henry had done. Will Hodgkinson explained that Art of Noise brought classical and avant-garde sounds into pop by using samplers instead of tape. Musicians like Matmos later noted musique concrète in songs such as Aaliyah’s Are You That Somebody? (1998) and Missy Elliott’s "backwards chorus." They also cited works like Art of Noise’s Close (to the Edit) (1984), Meat Beat Manifesto’s Storm the Studio (1989), and the music of Public Enemy, Negativland, and People Like Us. Chuck Eddy wrote that by 1991, heavy metal bands began using musique concrète techniques, such as the jackhammer and national anthem sounds in Slaughter’s Up All Night (1990).

In 2025, Daniel Blumberg’s Oscar-winning score for the film The Brutalist used musique concrète techniques. Other composers, like Mathieu Lamboley, who scored the TV series Lupin, and Jean-Paul Salomé, who made the film L'affaire Bojarski (2026) using sounds from a banknote-printing press, have also cited musique concrète as an influence.