After WWII, recording tape was introduced to the world. It had been invented by I.G. Farben, Nazi Germany’s answer to Dow Chemical, and it took the world by storm. At this time, Pierre Schaeffer had developed the concept of
musique concrète which was music made from sources of sound whose origin is unseen. Tape furthered the vocabulary of musique concrète because of its malleable nature. A premier piece of musique concrète is John Cage’s 1952 tape collage,
Williams Mix. Musique concrète was a virtual reversal of synthesation. Synths sought to construct the sound of ordinary instruments from purely electronic sources whereas musique concrète often mutated ordinary sounds acutely in order to disguise the source. In both cases, though, the source was hidden except in one case the source was electronic masquerading as natural and in the other the source was natural masquerading as electronic. The exception was when synths were used to generate purely electronic sounds that could not be produced any other way. In
Williams Mix, Cage spliced the sources to very short durations and then had them all play very quickly in succession. The source was still instantly identifiable in some cases but not in others. Schaeffer’s 1948 piece,
Etude aux Chemins de Fer, was composed of the various sounds made by trains and whistles recorded on discs but the sound of the phonograph stylus riding in the record groove becomes an integral part of the sound. Physicist/composer Hugh Le Caine’s 1955 tape piece,
Dripsody, is composed entirely of a single recorded drop of water sped up, slowed down, and spliced in rapid succession until it sounds like an electronic keyboard playing up and down the scales. This could be done in a matter of minutes with a modern sampler but took Le Caine months of endless splicing to achieve.
John Cage - Williams Mix - YouTube
Hugh Le Caine: Dripsody (1955) - YouTube