Musique Concrète

Quatre Études de Bruits (1948)

"This determination to compose with materials taken from an existing collection of experimental sounds, I name musique concrète to mark well the place in which we find ourselves, no longer dependent upon preconceived sound abstractions, but now using fragments of sound existing concretely and considered as sound objects defined and whole."
(Schaeffer, cited in Chadabe, 1997, pp. 26-27)

"You have two sources for sounds: noises, which always tell you something – a door cracking, a dog barking, the thunder, the storm; and then you have instruments. An instrument tells you, la-la-la-la [sings a scale]. Music has to find a passage between noises and instruments. It has to escape. It has to find a compromise and an evasion at the same time; something that would not be dramatic because that has no interest to us, but something that would be more interesting than sounds like Do-Re-Mi-Fa." (Schaeffer, cited in Kahn, 2001, p. 110)

(part of a document given in a workshop about sound, MA Digital Arts, Camberwell College of Arts)