Éliane Radigue

French abstract composer famed for her synthesiser works that murmur 'like a tone that never quite fades'

- Patrick Kidd

In every sound there is a potential song, in every noise a new chord in nature's symphony.

As a young mother living by the airport in Nice in the 1950s, Éliane Radigue would listen to the whirr of aircraft propellers and the roar of the Mediterranean surf and use the emotions they stirred in her to create music.

Radigue, one of France's leading abstract composers, found music everywhere, even in the moves on a chessboard as her then husband, the avant-garde artist Arman, played with Marcel Duchamp. She felt that music was always in the ear of the listener. "We all have a little music in us," she said. "It's the way we listen that makes the music."

When she heard a radio broadcast of Pierre Schaeffer's Étude aux Chemins de Fer she realised that the railways at the Gare des Batignolles had sung to him the same way the planes did to her. She got an internship at Schaeffer's Studio d'Essai in Paris, working with him and Pierre Henry, another pioneer of what they called "musique concrète", exploring how to blend sounds.