In the first part of our Sampling time line discovery we looked into the first pioneer Russolo and his 'Noise Orchestra'... It didn't go down to well in 1913, causing a few riots! In this next installment of Hardware Heroes we look into how the art of sampling developed into something a bit more loopy!France, 1942. Pierre Schaeffer, an engineer at French broadcaster RTF was promoted to oversee research in the science of acoustics. During this research Schaeffer ran a studio full of what was then cutting-edge equipment at his disposal. He soon discovered the groove-locking technique through which one sound can be played constantly through a circular groove cut into a record, rather than the track spiralling to its impending end at the centre of the disc.
Inspired by the work of Luigi Russolo and attracted to the idea of recording and manipulating everyday sounds Schaeffer began to experiment with the notion that classical – or as he would call it, ‘serious’ – music begins with an abstract sound that is then arranged and composed into a structured sound inside the constraints of the typical musical form. Schaeffer set out to subvert this process using his own recordings of everyday sound as the basis for a musical form without constraints. This he would name ‘Musique concrète’.
Through his experimentations in Musique concrete Schaeffer would construct perhaps the earliest known version of the sampler. As heard in his 1948 composition Étude aux chemins de fer, Schaeffer used his groove-locking technique to manipulate the recorded sounds of trains to play on a constant loop. Playing different loops simultaneously, a series of record players were hooked up to a keyboard, allowing the operator to trigger any of the sounds at any time. This freedom of improvisation and exploration of variation were elements intrinsic to the nature of ‘Musique concrète’.Now a pioneer in musical manipulation, Schaeffer finally accepted musical instruments into his arsenal of altered sound. However, the sampled instruments were doctored to correspond with the abstract nature of ‘Musique concrète’ and techniques such as tape splicing and looping were also explored.
Schaeffer’s embrace of electronic experimentation laid the basic groundwork for sampling as we know it today. Watch out for more articles in this series exploring the progression of the sampler and the people who brought these innovations to life.
