Concrète

Concrète, in the context of music, most often refers to musique concrète, a form of electroacoustic music that emerged in Paris in the late 1940s. It treats recorded sounds—voices, noises, instrumental timbres, and environmental sounds—as the primary material for composition, rather than traditional pitched notes played by conventional instruments.

Composers working in this approach manipulated sounds with tape-based techniques. Methods included cutting and splicing recorded material, looping segments, altering playback speed and pitch, applying filters, and using various dynamic processes. By combining and transforming sounds from the real world, musique concrète aimed to create new textures and structures without relying on conventional musical notation.

The movement coalesced around the work of Pierre Schaeffer, who around 1948–49 developed systematic methods for shaping found sounds into music and coined the term musique concrète. Early landmark works include Étude aux chemins de fer (Railway Study, 1948) and the collaborative Symphonie pour un homme seul (1949) with Pierre Henry. In the early 1950s, Schaeffer and colleagues established the Groupe de Recherche Musicale (GRM), a studio-based group that further developed and disseminated these ideas, influencing subsequent electronic and avant-garde music.

Impact and legacy: Musique concrète helped redefine what could count as musical material and laid foundational concepts for electronic music, sampling, and sound design. While later trends incorporated synthesized and digitally generated material, the key principle—treating recorded sound as a legitimate sonic material—remains central to the musique concrète approach.