Prior to the use of technology, if you wanted to create some form of delay in sound, you would literally go back to the basic principles of using reflective surfaces. With the advent of recording technology, specifically magnetic tape, it became possible to capture this effect using microphones, allowing the first produced music to be achieved, using effects. Obviously these were more organic than artificial, but the practice was sound enough.
As magnetic tape became more widely adopted, much musical exploration took place in the ’50s classical music world. The style of music known as musique concrète, was heavily associated with the use of tape recorders. Also described as ‘found sound’, musique concrète relied heavily on what could be regarded as one of the earliest forms of sampling. Sounds would be recorded to tape, vari-speeded, re-recorded and then spliced.