Pierre Schaeffer - Treatise on Musical Objects: An Essay Across Disciplines

The Trait des objets musicaux was first published in 1966. It was the result of twenty years of experimentation and research by Pierre Schaeffer on sound and its relation to and impact on music. The inventor of musique concrte , Schaeffer pursued the quest of understanding how we listen and how our perception of sound determines what music is and how we listen to and enjoy it.

Schaeffer considered this book untranslatable owing to the complexity and novelty of the concepts, as well as to his understanding of the translation difficulties of the French language. Several attempts were made, in Portuguese (from Brazil), always based on an abridged version; however, the task of bringing it to English was still to be undertaken, even though musicians and musicologists around the world currently use many of his concepts. The Trait , or TOM as it is called in French, was written as a consequence of his work and discoveries while he was leader of the GRMC (Groupe de recherche en musique concrte), which he created in 1951, and the GRM (Groupe de recherches musicales), into which he transformed the initial group in 1958 in order to give to it a broader outreach than musique concrte. Since the GRM still exists today as a department of the French National Audiovisual Institute (Ina) and continues to promote and foster Schaeffers ideas on sound and sound creation, it seemed appropriate for the GRM to undertake the translation of the Treatise on Musical Objects .

The works and thoughts of Pierre Schaeffer have had a strong influence on musicians and musicologists, as well as on scientists; he challenged many preexisting concepts in the long tradition of musical craftsmanship and practice, and he challenged the way we listen and how our brain makes sense of audio phenomena. The reason for this radical change in the way of understanding musical phenomena was not based on science but on Schaeffers experience with radio technology, when he studied how radio as a medium brought new ways of using the voice and the dramatic influence of recorded sounds on our perception. It was through experimentation that Pierre Schaeffer slowly built up a new understanding of how the listening process works and how sounds have the extraordinary capacity to create meaning for our minds through listening.

His main question was, What intrinsic difference is there between listening to an event happening in front of us and listening only to the sound produced by the same event? There was, indeed, a difference, but what was it, and how could it be analyzed? The initial point for Schaeffer was radio production, and particularly radio drama, a domain in which he started working in the early 1940s. Using recorded sounds to enhance the dramatic effects of voices, he slowly progressed toward a point where he started considering recorded sound as a musical element. Music has always been based on performance, which is the act by an individual of producing a specific sound with a musical function; this, however, limits the number of possible sounds for music since the sound produced has to be controllable and produced at a specific moment of the performance. The fact of using prerecorded sounds enlarges the sound possibilities for the orchestra and brings a new range of potential sounds into music. To prove the potential of recorded sounds, he started combining and assembling them in sound structures, which he called tudes or experiments on different types of sound sources and combinations. The result of these experiments he called musique concrte , defining through this expression the situation where, through concrete listening to sound material, the composer creates the musical structure, in opposition to traditional musical writing, in which the abstract creation of the composer on the score leads to the concrete listening situation of the performance.