Pierre Henri Marie Schaeffer (August 14, 1910–August 19, 1995) was a French composer, noted as the inventor of musique concrète. Life Schaeffer was born in Nancy. His parents were both engineers, and at first it seemed that Pierre would also take this as a career. He studied at the École Polytechnique and after a stint as a telecommunications engineer in Strasbourg from 1934, he found a job in 1936 at Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision Française (ORTF) in Paris. It was there that he began to experiment with recorded sounds, convincing the radio station's management to let him use their equipment. He tried playing sounds backwards, slowing them down, speeding them up and juxtaposing them with other sounds, all techniques which were virtually unknown at that time. His first completed piece as a result of these experiments was the Étude aux chemins de fer (1948) which was made from recordings of trains. By that time,

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