... specific artistic aims. In France, sound engineer and composer Pierre Schaeffer formed the French Radio studio (RTF) in Paris, built around several tape recorders, microphones, and tape editing equipment. The principal techniques for creating music were the cutting, splicing, looping, or reversal of lengths of recorded tape. These tape manipulation techniques resulted in a kind of sound montage, painstakingly created from recordings of sounds from the "real world". Schaeffer referred to the results as musique concrète, a term still in wide use today, especially in France. His first experiment in this new genre used recordings of the sounds of trains, and all his works of this time were brief sound studies with evocative titles, such as Symphonie pour un homme seul, composed in collaboration with his younger colleague, Pierre Henry. Schaeffer's practical experiments in electronic music composition were supported by his influential theoretical writings on the subject, and the studio ...

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