The Traité 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 concrète, 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),1 Spanish,2 and Dutch,3 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 Traité, 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 concrète), 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 concrète. Since the GRM still exists today as a department of the French National Audiovisual Institute (Ina) and continues to promote and foster Schaeffer’s 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 Schaeffer’s 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 “études” or experiments on different types of sound sources and combinations. The result of these experiments he called musique concrète, 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.
While working on his musical études, Schaeffer started to understand the properties of sounds and the ease or difficulty of combining them depending on their spectral nature or their behavior through time; most of all, he understood the musical difficulty of dealing with sounds that strongly refer to their causal origin, for example the fact that a barking dog will be listened to with regard to its origin and behavior before being listened to as a potential musical source. This understanding brought two immediate conclusions: the first was that a conceptual framework was needed to deal with the complexity and diversity of sound; the second was that specific technological tools were needed to modify the physical structure or the behavior of sounds. One of Schaeffer’s important contributions concerns his concept of typomorphology, indicating that a twofold approach should be taken in analyzing sounds: their “type,” or spectral distribution, and their “morphology,” or behavior through time. These ideas underlie the concept of spectromorphology, which was developed years later and became a powerful tool for sound analysis.4
This could have remained as the experimental approach of a musician-scientist, who then publishes his results and makes them available to the scientific community. But Pierre Schaeffer was both a radio and communications person, as well as a musician. He worked hard on the diffusion of his discoveries through writings, conferences, and his main medium: radio programs. He understood the need for an interdisciplinary approach to understand the phenomena and to push his ambition even further by creating structures within institutions that would deal with musique concrète, with research on perception and analysis of musical structures, and build tools for sound creation and transformation. Thus began one of the most unusual experiments of forming the Musical Research Group, which through different technological and institutional developments and modifications still exists. In 1960, based on the experience of the GRM and wishing to expand the experiment to the audiovisual domain, he created the Service de la Recherche (Research Department), bringing together the GRM, a newly created Group for Image Research (the GRI), the Technical Research Group (GRT), and the Critical Studies Group (GEC).5 In 1975, when the National Radio and Television Office (ORTF) was split into different institutions and companies, he created the National Audiovisual Institute, which brought together archives, training, research, and the GRM. Pierre Schaeffer had the capacity to imagine and build original institutions with all the complexity this means in terms of convincing authorities and regulatory bodies, but most of all he had the incredible gift of bringing people from different domains to work together and collaborate toward a common aim. He once said that the GRM was an “impossible and necessary institution”; this probably sums up the whole of his vision and the strength of his action.
Today, sixty years after the first edition of the Traité des objets musicaux and almost seventy years after the first works of musique concrète, the GRM has not only continued the tradition of promoting the creation of new music based on recorded sounds or other technologies but has continuously put Schaeffer’s ideas into practice, adapting them to new technological environments. Pierre Schaeffer was born in 1910 and died in 1995; his work has interested several generations of researchers and musicians and they concern all those who wish to understand music differently.
Over the last twenty years, the GRM has felt the need for an English version of the Traité des objets musicaux. Schaeffer’s ideas keep spreading, and scholars often work on his writings in French or mostly quote sentences and concepts from his work. It was clear from the beginning of the project in 2005 that this task was too long and complex for a single person. This is why, knowing their excellent work in translating Schaeffer’s first book on musique concrète,6 I contacted and met Christine North, former senior lecturer, Middlesex Polytechnic/University, and John Dack, musician and senior lecturer at Middlesex University, to talk about the project and a possible method of work. Furthermore, Christine and John had translated the Guide des objets sonores, a wonderful reference book written by Michel Chion in 1977 explaining Schaeffer’s concepts and terms.7 The idea was that they would take on the huge task of making the first translation of the book, and then a group of selected readers concerned with electroacoustic music, and familiar with Schaeffer’s ideas, would read the book and comment on the English terms and sentences and propose a common approach and style to be used throughout the book. The GRM would finance the translation and costs of traveling for the meetings that would be necessary in the process.
The difficulty with the translation of the Treatise is the complexity of the language associated with new concepts and terms that already exist in French but that are not used in a musical context. Thus, a reading group was formed including both translators along with Marc Battier, a French composer and professor at the Paris Sorbonne University; Leigh Landy, an American composer and professor at the De Montfort University in Leicester; and myself, a composer and the director of the GRM. A sixth person was added on the second round of amendments: Valérie Vivancos, a musician and English translator who had some previous knowledge about Schaeffer and read the English version of the Treatise.
After the reading group had read the first translation, we held a three-day meeting in Paris, in September 2013, where we went through the terms, the style, and the meaning of a number of sentences. I have no hesitation in saying it was a tremendous meeting; we had so much to say and discuss, so many equivalent terms to find, so many sentences to discuss and understand. Without the initial translation process it would have been chaos! We left with agreements on terms, uses, and sentences that would need to be updated and amended.
We met again in September the following year, after Christine North and John Dack had incorporated many of the committee’s suggestions, for a final reading of the book over three days, the committee this time including Valérie Vivancos. It proved to be a highly profitable meeting in which most issues were cleared, and by the end of the meeting we had produced a highly polished version, coherent in language and with an established vocabulary. We also decided to include a series of footnotes, which were needed to explain the origin of some words, to give details on events, or to explain who people named in the book are. Also the English references for the books mentioned by Schaeffer were added. After all our meetings and interesting discussions, one of the words that kept ringing in our ears as we searched for an English equivalent was trame, describing a continuous sound with some kind of permanent spectral structure. We translated it as weft, conscious that the English word drone used today in music also describes this kind of sound, however with a more harmonic perspective. The concept of trame, however, is closer to that of weft and retains the all-important imagery. We also took into account the language of the day, when these concepts were only beginning to take root.
The Treatise often speaks about technology in a period when computers were a distant dream in sound processing; often technological concepts are used that have to be understood within the technology of that period. There are some images in the book that are sound representations made with the technology of the 1960s; actually, they were very fine images and some of the first successful attempts to visualize sound. Many new ideas and concepts brought much novelty to musical thought and established musical research as a complex technical, philosophic, and semiotic action. The Treatise on Musical Objects explores all these domains and creates a coherent framework where disciplines collaborate and blend to propose a new understanding of music and humankind.
My special thanks to all the team who participated in this important work and to all those colleagues who worked with Schaeffer and contributed to the production of his unique work.
Daniel Teruggi