concrete music [literature]

[psychomimesis]

Hi
I'm looking for literature about music concrete: sampling techniques, sound collage and sound composition. I'm interest in sound composition or improvisation with sounds, where focus is on montage and collage [in contrast musical composition that focuses on rhythm and melody].

- thanks -

[Bobbotov]

The term "musique concrete" is French and was used to describe the work of seminal French composers like Pierre Henry and Pierre Schaeffer back in the 1940's. Essential it is electro-acoustical music done by recording natural sounds with tape recorders and then manipulating those sounds. They also employed some electronic devices such as oscillators and other circuits to enhance their creations. It was a very experimental period.

Wikipedia has a good overview here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musique_concr%C3%A8te

There are some book references listed at the end although most will be in French.

Nowadays the use of samplers greatly simplifies the tedious task the early pioneers had to go through with cutting up small segments of tape and re-arranging, re-splicing. Must have been a real nightmare but they got some outstanding results nevertheless.

I think that fundamentally the same concepts of composition that apply to conventional music also apply: i.e. rhythm, dynamics, timbre, etc. It would probably be a good idea to listen to some of those early recordings to get a feel for how they implemented their sounds.

Here is a list of extant recordings from Amazon. There's a couple of books listed as well:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss? ... te&x=0&y=0

If you want to try some of this yourself it is best to do field recordings or acquire a library of sound recordings from nature and man made devices. Really anything goes and is only limited by your creativity and imagination. You can subject those sounds to whatever manipulation, mangling, distortion you can think of and put them together in some cohesive, musical manner.

I personally have done some things along this vein although not strictly from field recordings. Here is an example:

http://www.fileden.com/files/2008/6/1/1 ... usique.mp3

[Winstontaneous]

I've been doing some reading lately that touches upon Schaeffer & music concrete:

The Computer Music Tutorial
This book is the single best resource I've found for understanding different synthesis techniques and their historical backgrounds.

The Ambient Century
An entertaining overview/listening guide to sonic explorations since the late 19th century.

For more academic treatments of sound art (specifically, relating it to trends in the visual arts) I recommend:

Noise Water Meat

Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art
This has a good chapter on Schaeffer.

If you haven't already, be sure to check out people like LaMonte Young, Iannis Xenakis, David Tudor, Brian Eno, Delia Derbyshire...

[jancivil]

a great example of it is Varese using tape constructions from recordings of a factory as percussion...
Deserts

[psychomimesis]

Ou! really thanks for useful info, especially books

[Winstontaneous]

I just discovered Allen Strange's classic book Electronic Music: Systems, Techniques, and Controls
While it's not about musique concrete per se, it is one of the best resources on modular synth sound design and tape manipulation.

Also Curtis Roads' Microsound is a great book about working with sound as a raw material. It's especially good if you want to learn how the pioneering work of Gabor and Xenakis led to modern granular synthesis.