Beatriz Ferreyra entered the Groupe de Recherches Musicales in Paris in 1963 after hearing musique concrète for the first time.
She later worked with Pierre Schaeffer on the Solfège de l’Objet Sonore, but her own description of those early years is refreshingly different from the mythology surrounding institutional electronic music.
Ferreyra has said she arrived without an academic composition background and had to learn tape editing, filtering and recording directly through practice. She was fascinated less by traditional notes than by the physical character of sound itself. She has described hearing sounds as forms and colours, almost as though composing were another kind of painting.
That feels important because electronic music is often taught backwards.
First understand the technology.
Then make something.
Ferreyra’s story begins with fascination.
A sound was interesting enough that she needed to discover how to work with it.
The technical knowledge followed the desire to listen more closely.
That may be why early musique concrète still has something useful to teach producers surrounded by sophisticated software.
A new plug-in does not automatically produce a new way of hearing.
Sometimes the more difficult skill is noticing that an ordinary sound was already interesting before anyone processed it.
https://brahms.ircam.fr/en/composer/beatriz-ferreyra/biography
#BeatrizFerreyra #MusiqueConcrete #ElectroacousticMusic #SoundArt
