In 1968, when ICOHTEC was founded, there was little research on the topic of technology, music and sound, particularly in historical perspective. In the 1970s books like R. Murray Schafer`s "The Tuning of the World" and Jacques Attali`s "Noise. On the Political Economy of Music" shed some light on the topic, but it was not before the 1990s that a noticeable number of publications was published in this field. This came from various disciplines like musicology, science and technology studies, cultural and communication studies, film studies and ethnomusicology, but also , in a slowly increasing degree, from the history of technology. ICOHTEC has played a role in this which will be assessed in this paper. Starting with a large session at the ICOHTEC Symposium in Budapest in 1996, at which many scholars who are now established figures in the field gave papers, ICOHTEC´s involvement in sound and music continued until the present day with major sessions in 2002, 2006 and 2011. Several publications resulted from this. ICOHTEC can claim to have provided an important forum for discussing the topic of music, sound and the history of technology. Its symposia have absorbed new trends in this field but they have also provided impulses and stimuli pointing towards new directions. Apart from a brief historical survey and some stocktaking, the paper will try to identify new promising research areas like the relationship between seeing and hearing, training the ear, testing and simulation, or the relationship between sound and language (how to put sound and music into words?).