Musique concrète (French for "concrete music" or "real music") is a form of electroacoustic music that utilises acousmatic sound as a compositional resource. The compositional material is not restricted to the inclusion of sounds derived from musical instruments or voices, nor to elements traditionally thought of as "musical" (melody, harmony, rhythm, metre and so on). The theoretical underpinnings of the aesthetic were developed by Pierre Schaeffer, beginning in the late 1940s. The initial practices of musique concrete included such techniques as looping, changing the speed/pitch of recordings, filtering out frequencies until only a 'trace' of the original sound remains, mechanical reverberation, etc. Besides magnetic tapes and shellac record players, original pieces of technology were invented for the need of composing, such as the phonogene, the morphophone and synthesizers.
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