Musique concrète is music composed directly from recorded sounds rather than written notes, developed in Paris by the radio engineer Pierre Schaeffer. Its birth is usually dated to 5 October 1948, when French radio broadcast his Concert de bruits, a set of five studies made at the Studio d’Essai; the first, Étude aux chemins de fer, was assembled from recordings of trains.
With Pierre Henry, Schaeffer composed Symphonie pour un homme seul (1950), and in 1958 he founded the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM), which became a central studio of electroacoustic music, later home to composers such as Bernard Parmegiani and Iannis Xenakis. A direct line runs from these studios to drone: Éliane Radigue learned the craft after meeting Schaeffer in 1955 and later assisted Henry, before turning tape feedback and slowly drifting loops into the long, almost motionless works that define her music. The premise that any recorded sound can be looped, stretched and heard for its own sake remains fundamental to the genre.