I am here to extend your knowledge on concrete music. If you enjoy listening to music from today, then it would be totally different without the concrete effect.
Pierre Schaeffer developed concrete music, or musique concrete, in 1948. This was a break through in music. The style allowed the music to be altered to create sonic collages. With the tape recorder being invented in the late 1940's, this opened a new window for composers modifying sound.
Ianis Xenakis was a pupil of Schaeffer's. In 1958, he composed the piece "Concret PH" using burning charcoal as the sound source. He was one of the most important concrete composers.
Concrete music is based on a manipulation of tape. It focuses on sounds found in the recordings naturally, rather than electronically produced sounds made by synthesizers. Pieces that lasted only a few minutes could have taken months to record because of cutting and splicing. A tape could be cut or spliced in five ways. There is the straight cut, straight splice, diagonal cut, diagonal splice, and finished splice. They each had a unique effect to the music. There are many other techniques, as well. Some of them are altering the speed of a recorded sound, playing a tape backwards, and combining various altered sounds.
I hope this bit of knowledge has helped you to understand how music has developed over the years. I also hope you can appreciate the way the sounds are made and the time and patients it took many composers to develop the natural sounds.
