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This article looks at the work of British documentary filmmakers in the 1930s in films like 'Coal Face' and how their use of sound pre-figured the work of Pierre Schaeffer in the 1940s and 1950s. His musique concrète attempted to free everyday noises from their sources and original contexts so they could be used as musical material just like musical notes. The way the 1930s British documentarists used sound showed strong parallels with his later approach.
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This page is a summary of: ‘There Must Be a Poetry of Sound That None of Us Knows…’: Early British documentary film and the prefiguring of musique concrète, Organised Sound, July 2017, Cambridge University Press,
DOI: 10.1017/s1355771817000085.
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