History of montage and musique concrète

Walter Ruttmann's audio montage Wochenende (Weekend, 1930) is widely regarded as a groundbreaking work in the development of sound collage and radio plays:

• Sound film without images: an early precursor of musique concrète
• Berlin soundscape: urban noise, human voices, and environmental sounds

Audio montage

Assembling, fragmenting, layering, and transforming sound material across different time scales.

• Sound collage: Walter Ruttmann, Wochenende (1930)
• Musique concrète: Pierre Schaeffer, Cinq études de bruits (1948)
• Microsound / micromontage: Curtis Roads, Half-life, Part I: Sonal Atoms (1999)
• Plunderphonics: John Oswald, Dab (1989)
• Mashup: Danger Mouse, The Grey Album (2004)

Musique concrète

Composition using recorded sounds as the primary compositional material, pioneered by the French composer Pierre Schaeffer (1910–1995).

Techniques

• tape splicing: cutting and joining recorded sections
• looping: repeating a recorded section
• layering: combining sounds simultaneously
• tape-speed variation: changing pitch and duration together
• reversing: playing a recording backward

Montage in sound

• Walter Ruttmann – Wochenende (1930)
• Halim El-Dabh – The Expression of Zaar (1944)
• Pierre Schaeffer – Cinq études de bruits (1948)
• Pierre Henry – Astrologie (1952; musique concrète; score with Marius Constant)
• Luc Ferrari – Presque rien No. 1: le lever du jour au bord de la mer (1967–70)

Halim El-Dabh: recorded-sound composition

In Cairo, Halim El-Dabh used a wire recorder and studio processing to transform a recording of a zār ceremony into The Expression of Zaar (1944).

• recorded sound became compositional material before Schaeffer's Paris experiments
• this parallel history shows that electroacoustic montage did not develop along a single line

Pierre Schaeffer: transforming recorded sound

Pierre Schaeffer's Cinq études de bruits (1948) established musique concrète as composition with recorded sounds.

• recordings replace notes and instruments as the primary material
• cutting, looping, reversing, layering, and speed change transform the material
• repetition and transformation shift attention away from the original source
• the recorded sound becomes a compositional object

▶ Listen online (external link)

Luc Ferrari: composing an environment

▶ Listen online (external link)

Luc Ferrari's Presque rien No. 1: le lever du jour au bord de la mer (1967–70) creates the impression of a morning in the fishing port of Vela Luka.

• recognizable environmental sounds
• recurring events reveal rhythms of everyday life
• recordings from different places are selected and assembled

→ The scene sounds documentary, but its space and continuity are composed.

Analog workflow

• Recording medium: magnetic tape machines.
• Editing: manual with razor blades, splicing tape, and leader tape for timing.
• Mixing: performed live on analog consoles.
• Processing: hardware units for EQ, compression, reverb, and delay.
• Bounce-downs: multiple generations of mixdowns caused signal degradation.

Digital workflow: practical advantages

• Non-destructive
• Easy editing and iteration
• Sample-accurate editing
• Visual feedback (waveforms, meters)
• Automation recording and modification
• Lower noise floor
• More compact (no mounting/cabling)
• Look-ahead processing (via latency)
• Less expensive

Sound design

An applied and purposeful artistic approach.

• Creative work with sounds and noise
• Communicative design with emotional impact

Example: An electric vehicle's warning sound is artificially designed for recognition and safety.

▶ Listen to the HELLA AVAS example (external link)

Auditory identification

The ability to assign a sound to a source without visual information.

• Recourse to world knowledge (prototypical imagination)
• Generalization

Audio example in preparation

Describing sound

Dedicated vocabulary for hearing is limited; many descriptors are borrowed from other senses. Köhler's experiment on the "quality of impression" (1929): Takete / Baluba.

• cross-modal perception

Cross-modal correspondence

Cross-modal perception lets us address conceptual metaphors, particularly spatial metaphors (Görne).

• "High" and "low": pitch mapped onto vertical space
• "Bright" and "dark": timbre described through vision

L'objet sonore (Pierre Schaeffer)

The sound itself, considered apart from its source and meaning.

• Physical: duration, dynamics, spectrum (measurable acoustic features)
• Metaphorical: grain, brightness, weight (borrowed from other sensory modalities)

Audio example in preparation

→ Acousmatic listening: The absence of the visible sound source encourages reduced listening and attention to the sound object itself.

Typology and morphology of sounds

Perceptual classification of sound objects through reduced listening, developed by Pierre Schaeffer and building on earlier vocabulary research with Abraham Moles.

• Typology: sorts sound objects into general classes
  • energy articulation (facture): impulsive, sustained, iterative
  • spectral character (mass): pitched, complex/noise-like, variable
• Morphology: describes spectrum, dynamics, grain, and development through time
• Spectromorphology (Smalley): the shaping of spectra through time

Audiovisual object, synchrèse, valeur ajoutée

Audiovisual context: sound and image

See a dog, hear a dog?

(Paraphrased from Chion, Audio-Vision.)

In film and video, sound changes how an image is interpreted, while the image changes how sound is heard.

Michel Chion describes that seeing changes what we hear, while hearing changes what we see.

Sound and source

Even when we correctly identify a sound, its physical source may be entirely different.

• the effect of realism is not achieved solely through physical imitation
• decoupling the sound from its purely referential relationship to the source

Audio example in preparation

The sound object in the DAW

In the DAW, recorded sound appears as a waveform.

• it can be selected, moved, divided, layered, and transformed
• the onscreen object represents audio data; it is not the sound itself
• this representation encourages us to treat sound as malleable material

→ The Schaefferian sound object becomes an editable digital audio-object.

Timescales of audio composition

Curtis Roads: composition across multiple temporal scales.

• macro: complete work and overall form
• meso: sections, phrases, and larger events
• sound object: individual recorded or constructed sounds
• micro: grains, transients, and short sonic events
• sample: individual digital samples

Montage and mixing

Montage composes with audio material:

• selecting, cutting, arranging, and transforming sounds
• constructing temporal relationships and continuity

Mixing shapes the relationships within that composition:

• level, spectrum, dynamics, depth, and spatial position
• separation, connection, focus, and perspective

AI in audio production

AI-supported tools increasingly participate in established audio workflows (as of 2026).

• Generation and composition: samples, voices, sound effects, structures, and complete works
• Editing and processing: separation, restoration, transformation, and effects
• Mixing and postproduction: balance, EQ, dynamics, and mastering

Physics and perception

Editing and mixing connect measurable sound with how listeners perceive it.

Related: Fundamentals of Sound · Psychoacoustics · Sound Localization

Equal-loudness contours

Frequency masking

A strong sound in one frequency band masks weaker sounds in nearby frequencies.

Listen to an excerpt from Luc Ferrari's Presque rien No. 1.

▶ Listen online (external link)

• Which sound sources can you identify, and where are they?
• Describe one sound object by its energy articulation and spectral character.
• Where do you hear cuts, repetitions, or changes of perspective?
• When does the scene begin to feel composed?

Selected references

• Schaeffer, Pierre. Traité des objets musicaux: essai interdisciplines. Éditions du Seuil, 1966.
• Chion, Michel. Audio-Vision: Ton und Bild im Kino. Translated by Jean-Ulrich Lensing, Schiele & Schön, 2012.
• Görne, Thomas. Sounddesign: Klang, Wahrnehmung, Emotion. Hanser, 2017.
• Roads, Curtis. Microsound. MIT Press, 2001.

Selected references

• Smalley, Denis. “Spectromorphology: Explaining Sound-Shapes.” Organised Sound, vol. 2, no. 2, 1997, pp. 107–26.
• Thoresen, Lasse, and Andreas Hedman. “Spectromorphological Analysis of Sound Objects: An Adaptation of Pierre Schaeffer’s Typomorphology.” Organised Sound, vol. 12, no. 2, 2007, pp. 129–41.
• Sharma, Gerriet K., Matthias Frank, and Franz Zotter. “Towards Understanding and Verbalizing Spatial Sound Phenomena in Electronic Music.” Proceedings of the International Conference on Spatial Audio (ICSA 2015), Graz, Austria, Sept. 2015.

Related: Fundamentals of Sound · Psychoacoustics · Sound Localization