This chapter provides an overview of Southeast Asia's music history and examines some of the main themes in the historical discourse, including historical aspects of publications on the music cultures of the region. It focuses on a few of the sources, focusing mainly on the most-studied music cultures in Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, and the Philippines. A number of sources show that between the first and the tenth centuries CE, many parts of Southeast Asia experienced commercial, artistic, architectural, and religious contact with India and China, which substantially influenced the musical arts. Muslim proselytization, partly through the musical arts, continued to spread in the Netherlands East Indies (NEI), Malaysia, and the southern Philippines. Over the past half millennium, Southeast Asia's musical expressions have been closely related to its economic and political history, experience of colonialism, achievement of independence, grappling with modernization, and gradual entry into the global market economy.

This chapter uses the notion of techno cultures to suggest some broad perspectives on the historical development of popular music, especially outside the mainstream West, and to look at a set of distinctive music subcultures based around specific uses of extant technologies. New forms of bourgeois song and social dance emerge, together with commercialized versions of traditional musics, all representing forms of bourgeois synthesis. Film culture that centered around Bollywood constitutes a quintessential culture of mechanical reproduction. Indian film culture and film-music culture, which continue to flourish vigorously today, reflect the persistence of the mass-culture mode of production in specific regional centers even in the new millennium. Digital technology had a dramatically democratizing effect on standards and forms of musicianship. The effects of digital technology on modes of dissemination and exchange have been equally dramatic, although similarly concentrated in wealthier and modernized societies or pockets of societies.