Acousmatic Music

Acousmatic music is composed from recorded and electronic sound and played through loudspeakers. You may hear something recognizable—a voice, water, an instrument—or a sound transformed so far that its source is difficult to name. The composer works with the sound itself: its texture, weight, movement and place in space.

It grows from musique concrète, the practice of composing with recorded sound. A piece can develop through a sudden impact, a slowly changing mass of sound or a carefully placed silence, without needing a song structure or dance beat. In concert, a performer may shape how the finished composition spreads across an array of speakers. Listening on headphones offers another perspective, though it cannot reproduce every multichannel concert arrangement.

Acousmatic music grew from musique concrète composition with recorded sound, placing the act of listening and the transformation of recorded sound at the center of composition. The older word acousmatic described hearing a sound without seeing its source; Jérôme Peignot revived it in 1955 before François Bayle developed it into a specific musical approach. Bayle joined the GRM in 1960 and explored recorded and electronic sound, including cave-derived material for Jeîta. In 1974 the Acousmonium gave this studio-made music a distinctive public setting: an ensemble of loudspeakers that could project and distribute sound through a concert space.

Bernard Parmegiani’s 1975 De Natura Sonorum investigated relationships among instrumental, electronic and concrete materials across two series of six movements. The practice developed beyond Paris through networks of teachers, studios and composers; Québec already had important creative foundations when Francis Dhomont arrived in Montréal. His teaching there from 1980 to 1996 coincided with the growth of a recognized acousmatic school, recording labels and organizations devoted to presenting the music. His Sous le regard d’un soleil noir, realized from 1979 onward and premiered in 1981, joined recorded voices and studio construction in an extended dramatic form. Annette Vande Gorne’s Eau, first premiered in an initial mixed version in 1984, explored close-recorded water and the changing perception of silence in a fixed-media form. By the 1990s, multichannel composition and growing educational networks further expanded the field; Bayle used eight-track writing and Robert Normandeau completed an electroacoustic-composition doctorate in Montréal in 1992.

Later work continues to explore space and expression: Barrett’s 2019 Weathered Piano uses three-dimensional recorded material and ambisonics, Ferreyra’s Senderos cycle was issued in 2023, and Vande Gorne’s Vox Alia followed in 2025. New editions of earlier works also circulate alongside new pieces, keeping a distinction between the date a work was composed and the date a particular listening edition appeared.