The first experimental music piece composed outside of the Western world was written by Halim El-Dabh in Cairo, Egypt in 1944. In 1948, the Japanese composer Tōru Takemitsu conceived of a music in which he used technology to "bring noise into tempered musical tones". These are some of the starting points for a hidden or largely ignored history of Asian and African sound art and electroacoustic, electronic, experimental and noise music.

This presentation will not only focus on early academic experiments but also on non-academic artistic genres such as noise, electronica, and industrial, as well as on some of the developments that have occurred in the past decades in various Asian and African music scenes.