Was there really such a great difference between musique concrète and electronic music at that time?
Oh yes, absolutely. Electronic music used pure sounds, completely calibrated. You had to think digitally, as it were, in a way that allowed you to extend serial ideas into other parameters through technology. Whereas Schaeffer and Henry were working like samplers, their idea was to capture those sounds which couldn’t be serially calibrated because they were too complex in character. I was very interested in that. My first attempt with musique concrète was in 1958, with a few “Etudes”… Schaeffer had done studies with noise, I did studies with sounds in motion, repetitive sounds… What did you record as basic starting material? All kinds of things. The piano, of course, as reference instrument but not using it as a keyboard, more as a complex-sound-generator… Corrugated iron, percussion instruments, anything we could as a sound source. We went to fleamarkets, workshops and factories looking for bits of metal, springs… All the founder members of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales w
