Pierre Schaeffer
Pierre Schaeffer was a French composer, engineer, and broadcaster who, working at French radio in the 1940s, pioneered musique concrète — music assembled from recorded sounds manipulated on disc and later tape rather than written for instruments. His 1948 'Cinq études de bruits,' including the train study 'Étude aux chemins de fer,' and the 1950 'Symphonie pour un homme seul' (made with Pierre Henry) established techniques of looping, speed change, and sound montage that underpin nearly all later electronic and sample-based music. He admired the noise experiments of Futurist Luigi Russolo and founded the influential Groupe de Recherches Musicales, where a generation of electronic composers trained.
we haven’t charted Pierre Schaeffer yet
this stretch of the river isn’t mapped. we trace the watershed one artist at a time — and we’re always heading further upstream.