Conference Agenda

Pierre Schaeffer (1910-1995) was a composer, radio engineer, and philosopher who invented the musical genre known as musique concrète. While Schaeffer’s influence on the academic field of Sound Studies and on twentieth-century musical composition is well-known, his more than three decades spent working for the French colonial radio are less appreciated. Indeed, Schaeffer even held a leadership role in the Société de radiodiffusion de la France d’Outre-Mer (SORAFOM) in the late 1950s, which oversaw radio broadcasting in France’s overseas territories. While at the SORAFOM, Schaeffer founded the Studio-École, a radio training school in Paris for African technicians, broadcasters, and producers that was active from 1955-1969. This paper contextualizes Schaeffer’s involvement in these radiophonic projects within the broader history of French radiophonic expansion and strategy in its colonial territories. The Poste Colonial, founded in 1931, was France’s first international colonial broadcasting service, and this overseas radio network endured under different names even after its former colonies declared independence in the 1960s, until it was eventually consolidated in 1975 into what is still known as Radio-France-Internationale.

Building upon existing engagement with the origins and evolution of Schaefferian thought by scholars such as Kane (2014), Valiquet (2017), Stalarow (2018), Ridout (2020), and Bay (2024), this paper offers a fuller genealogy of terms like “acousmaticity,” “reduced listening,” “musique concrète,” and “musique expérimentale.” I analyze writings, compositions, and archival documents from the radio and Schaeffer’s personal archives to argue that many of the most fundamental ideas, techniques, and sounds that underpin Schaeffer’s compositions and writings developed from his extensive projects for the colonial radio in Africa. These concepts remain influential in musical experimentalism and the field of sound studies. Understanding the influence of African colonial radio on Schaeffer’s theories about sound not only provides needed context and clarification for these influential concepts, but it also augments our understanding of the history of the European avant-garde, demonstrating the expansive global histories that underpin seemingly universal concepts.