One could apply such a term to most any music recorded or amplified. What is normally meant by electro acoustic music is music that is formed by the creative use of recording, sound generating and computer equipment .
What electro-acoustic music does is it takes a closer look at the nature of sound itself.
In order to do that people like Pierre Schaeffer or Dennis Smalley, who are both composers and musicians, started to invent or apply scientific new terms for listening, performing and composing music. They and other people came up with a different view at what music is. A small representation for this is the electro-acoustic principle of abstract sounds:.
"Antonym of Referential (Sound), Abstract (Sound) has entered usage as a term in English under the influence of the Schaefferian tradition, in particular the notion of Reduced Listening. An Abstract Sound may perceptually privilege some quality or sonic parameter that a musician has focused their attention on in the studio. This could be in terms of the techniques employed in its creation or manipulation and/or the sound's contribution to the overall musical discourse. The perception of an Abstract Sound as such is therefore frequently determined by its context. A sound could be labelled abstract simply through the inability of the listener to ascribe to it any real or imagined provenance. Many electroacoustic musicians conceive of a continuum between the `abstract' and `referential' which may function as a micro- or macro- structuring principle, or determine the overall narrativity of the music. The pairing of terms abstract/referential is also referred to as intrinsic/extrinsic (by the composer and theorist Denis Smalley, for example). " .
During the 1950ies, until the 80ies many Electronic Studios opened up , funded by national broadcasting companies. In these spaces a lot of experimentation and composing of took place that nowadays form the basic principles of electro-acoustic music.