Pierre Schaeffer (1910-1995) was trained as an electronics technician, and during the 1940s he worked at Radiodiffusion Française (RDF), the French national radio network. There he had access to equipment for cutting LP recordings, as well as turntables,and a large library of sound effect records. Using this equipment he and his collaborators began experimenting with isolating individual sounds (“sonorous objects”), processing and altering these sounds, recombining them in new ways, and preserving the results as recordings. Schaeffer called this “musique concrète,” that is, music created from real-world sounds. In the 1940s Schaeffer worked primarily with audiodisk technology. In the 1950s he began to create musique concrète using tape recorders.

Five Studies of Noises was broadcast on RDF on October 5, 1948. It was not the first electronic music that the world had heard – electronic instruments like the theremin and the ondes martenot had been widely heard in the 20s and 30s. But Shaeffer’s Five Studies were the first to use naturally occurring, rather than electronically produced, sounds and to treat these sounds on their own terms rather than trying to get the sounds to conform to people’s pre-existing ideas of “music.”

“Study with trains” uses recordings that Schaeffer made at a Paris train station (Gare des Batignolles) of steam locomotives whistling, trains accelerating, and rail cars passing over joints in the tracks. Schaeffer describes its form as a series of increasingly free rhythmic variations on the opening material, returning to the “theme” at the end of the piece. “Black study” is composed of sounds made at the piano – speeded up, slowed down, played backwards and otherwise manipulated. Again the piece ends with a reprise of the opening material. The pianist was Pierre Boulez.