According to French composer Risset, spectral music led to composers who desired to combine the vibrations of acoustic and electronic music and create works using sound as their palette of original material. His analysis work was the matching and manipulation of recorded instrumental and natural sounds as a way of bridging the gap between the two mutually antagonistic worlds of early electronic music. The music melody is secondary, the natural sound coming first.

Gérard Grisey’s music is often true for spectral music, which he is credited with founding along with fellow composer Tristan Murail.

Music does not have melodic motives or harmonic progressions to set periods. Rather we hear sound textures and motion. Feeling like spectral music doesn’t have melodic content and reflect what the composer has in mind.

Gérard Grisey spent much of his career exploring the spectrum of tone between harmonic overtones and noise. Also, he was passioned about the slow music process and made musical time a prior element of various of his works.

He was of the opinion that: “We are musicians and our model is sound not literature, sound not mathematics, sound not theatre, visual arts, quantum physics, geology, astrology or acupuncture”