Journal · 3 min read

From Noise to Pulse

How a recording of trains in Paris, a Moog synthesizer in Munich and three friends from Belleville invented the language we dance to today.

All electronic dance music starts with an uncomfortable idea: that any sound can be music. In 1948, Pierre Schaeffer, an engineer at French radio, recorded locomotives, wheels and whistles at a Paris station and assembled them into a piece called Étude aux chemins de fer. He broadcast it as a “concert of noises” and named his method musique concrète [1].

Schaeffer sped recordings up and slowed them down, reversed them and repeated fragments. He discovered that a sound changes character when you cut off its initial attack [1]. Repeat, cut, recontextualize: it is, quite literally, the grammar of the loop.

Paris vs. Cologne

In the early fifties, musique concrète in Paris stood against West Germany’s elektronische Musik, which worked only with electronically generated sounds. Schaeffer’s circle included Pierre Henry, Luc Ferrari, Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Edgard Varèse and Iannis Xenakis [2]. In 1958, Varèse’s Poème électronique played at the Brussels World’s Fair through 425 loudspeakers in a pavilion designed by Xenakis [2]. Over time the distinction blurred, and “electronic music” came to mean both [2].

1977: the year the machine learned to dance

In March 1977 Kraftwerk released Trans-Europe Express. Months later, Giorgio Moroder, Pete Bellotte and Donna Summer recorded “I Feel Love” in Munich on a Moog Modular 3P borrowed from composer Eberhard Schoener [4]. The rhythm was entirely synthesized, without the orchestra that had defined disco until then [3].

“This is it, look no further. This single is going to change the sound of club music for the next 15 years.” — Brian Eno, 1977 [3]

Eno undersold it. As Sound On Sound puts it, the track followed in the footsteps of Trans-Europe Express and paved the way for both house and techno [3].

Detroit: three friends and one word

In the mid-eighties, Juan Atkins, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson, high-school friends from Belleville, Michigan, built a futuristic sound inspired by Chicago’s house clubs [5]. They founded the Music Institute in downtown Detroit, which pulled a scattered scene together into an underground “family” [5].

In 1988 Neil Rushton released the compilation Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit in the UK. The three voted against marketing it as a regional variant of house and chose a term they were already using: techno. Atkins’ track “Techno Music” took its name from Alvin Toffler’s book The Third Wave [6]. Saunderson recalls that Atkins “set the pattern” and that he and May took their inspiration from him [7].

From Schaeffer’s tape to Moroder’s sequencer and Detroit’s drum machines, the idea is the same: repetition isn’t poverty, it’s trance. That’s why we’re called Bucle — Spanish for loop.