In 1913 an Italian futurist Luigi Russolo published "The Art of Noises" – a manifest of new music which refused academic traditions, outdated harmonies and keynotes in favor of noise variety (to produce them, Russolo used intonarumori (noise modulators) which he designed in cooperation with an artist called Ugo Piatti).

In 30 years, with the development of sound-recording equipment, "specific music" appeared, started by experiments of Pierre Schaeffer – he did not only record various noises but created sound structures by combining them. He also introduced a term "acousmatics" to denote a kind of music played without human participation – in fact, a term for any electronic music.

It was followed my music of John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, loop records by Steve Reich and ambient music canvas by Eduard Artemiev.

Experiments continued in the field of sound recording (for instance, in the early 1970s an Oxford University professor of Mathematics Michael Gerson developed a spatial sound system, the Ambisonic, which created a sound sphere around the listener) and playback (for example, Henry Brant, who composed music for giant orchestras and took a most careful approach to seating performers).

All that music continued living in concert halls and art galleries for some time, but beginning with the mid-60s sound artists brought it out – at first into the city streets, and then into the country – to fields and forests. This is how artificial sounds created in laboratories and studios met natural noises and resonators.