Pierre Schaeffer’s 4 delimitations:
1. Living animals voices sounds
2. Noises
3. Modified or prepared instruments
4. Conventional instruments

He used all 4 categories in non-traditional manners.

Schaeffer adopted 7 values:
1. Mass - organization of the sound in a spectral dimension.
2. Dynamics - measurable values of various components of the sound
3. Tone quality/Timbre - refers to tone
4. Melodic profile - temporal evolution of the total spectum of sound.
5. Profile of mass - spectral components of the sound mass low range to high rand and high range to low range
6. Grain - analysis of the irregularities of the surface of the sound
7. Pace - analysis of the amplitude dynamics of the sounds (how loud, how soft)

3 plans –
1. Harmonic Plan (material within the entire spectrum)
2. Dynamic Plan (affected the envelope ADSR)
3. Melodic Plan (pitch and tone, over time).

French vs. German
The French had a more organic approach to composition of electronic music.
The German approach was greatly influence by Serialism and 12-tone music – The German inventor Albert Schoenberg (1874-1951) and marked the beginning of serialism.

12-tone music (using the chromatic scale avoids a strong sense of melody, resolution, and cadences.

Tone rows – 5 general rules
1. 12 notes are organized in a different order or row
2. Each tone is given equal importance.
3. Row can be inverted or reversed, retrograde, forwards and backwards or combinations of directions
4. No repeats until all tones in a row are used
5. Can be manipulated to follow a ‘random’ pattern

Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007) was a German composer, and he was one of the most important and controversial composers of the 20th century. He is most well known for composing electronic music, tape loop music, aleatory music (controlled chance music), and musical spatialization. He started out by cutting and pasting music together in Schaeffer’s studio in 1952. The piece was called ETUDE.

The very nature of a piece of tape can be represented in time, and time makes the most sense to us as humans.
Duration can be controlled and manipulated in regards to a piece of tape by cutting, slicing or looping. He took the approach of serialized composition and applied mathematical analysis of tones to the generation, shape, editing of the tape-recorded sounds. To do this he used tone generators and tape.

Sine waves started to be manipulated on a tape. Serialism was used in tape creation to dynamics, attack, duration, and timbre. 1.92kHz is the average center frequency of the human voice. Stockhausen calculated what harmonics/overtones would be below and above and combined the pitches, defining the early form of additive synthesis.

“Studie II” in 1952 the first composition through sine waves. As the composition became a score, the piece had to follow a graphic representation, because the music would not appear to make any sense notated on a staff. The graphic representation, or score, consisted of a series of blocks to represent different tones, and lines drawn to represent the various manipulations of the sound envelopes, which include ADSR – the attack, decay, sustain, and release of a sound. Scoring this type of piece in this way takes the abstractness out of the music, as people are then able to follow along visually to this music that many people would view initially perceive as noise, not music.

Stockhausen’s process in the 1950’s consisted of 4 things.
1. Unified time structure
2. Splitting the sound
3. Multi-layering spatial composition
4. Equality of tone and noise

The organization of sound in this way liberated tones and music from the western traditional rules, and provided equality for music.
He is a big influence on the Beatles and Paul McCartney, for the Sergeant Pepper’s and White albums.