One approach was to work with recorded sounds , taking the entire world of sound as potential material for music , manipulating the chosen sounds through mechanical and electronic means , and assembling them into collages . Pierre Schaeffer ( 1910 – 1995 ) , who pioneered music of this type at Radiodiffusion Française ( French Radio ) in Paris in the 1940s , named it musique concrète because the composer worked with concrete sounds themselves rather than with music notation . Schaeffer ' s first experiments , Cinq études de bruits ( Five Studies of Noises ) for phonograph , were premiered at a concert in Paris in 1948 , then he collaborated with Pierre Henry ( b . 1927 ) , to create the first major work of musique concrète , Symphonie pour un homme seul ( Symphony for One Man ) , premiered in a 1950 radio broadcast .