Musique Concrête

Musique Concrete is an experimental style of music that uses recorded sounds. It was developed in the 1940s by Pierre Schaeffer. Sounds were manipulated by doing things such as playing them backwards, speeding them up or slowing them down, changing the pitch, or adding echo effects. After studying this style of music in 6th grade, we created our own Musique Concrete sound pieces using Garage Band on the iPads.

Each student came up with a theme for their piece and had to write a story to help explain what sounds we were hearing. They were allowed to record their own sounds or record sound clips from the Internet. Sounds were then looped, split, or modified within their pieces. Each piece had to be 48 bars long and contain at least 5 sound tracks. Themes chosen included hunting, sports, video games, storms, the rainforest, and the most popular choice: haunted houses and demonic children! There are too many projects for me to have time to upload them all, but here are a few of the completed projects.