You are able to make a toon with any sort of sound you can make. From typing on a keyboard, to scratching your hands on a table, to using your own vocals you are able to create your own unique sound that nobody else can recreate. Humans have learned throughout the years how to make music into something sad or happy through the movement and tone of the music they are making.

One of the most interesting types of music forms that has recently started is acapella. Acapella is when you create music with no instruments at all, just using your vocals. This means variations of the group have to beatbox, use their voices to replicate a piano or a guitar, and use their voices to sing the lyrics. Acapella has changed the music game for many artists. It’s challenging to recreate the sound an instrument makes with your own mouth, but some artists can do this very successfully and I believe this is one of the best ways to show off your talent.

This sound purely exists for entertainment and is supposed to be done by a group of people. Lots of people enjoy listening to acapella since it’s such a hard form of music to complete. There have been movies made about acapella, one of the most popular being Pitch Perfect. This movie helped influence the popularity that has grown around this form of music throughout the past few years.

I think throughout the rest of our lives and onto new generations the art of acapella will only be able to expand more. As time advances, the sound in songs is becoming more advanced because people are purely using technology to create noise, and the more technology in songs the harder it is to create that noise with your mouth. Being able to replicate music with your vocals proves a certain talent that not all people are able to do.

In our modern world, it seems like everyone fills their days with music. Whether they are driving, exercising, cooking, or relaxing, listening to the radio, playing music from a speaker, or using headphones or earbuds; the people of our day and age listen to music constantly.

Music has become a mundane part of the twenty first century first-world lifestyle but our relationship with music wasn’t always like this. For a long time, listening to music required a live performance. To hear music, you or someone you knew would have to play an instrument or you would have to make out outing to see it performed. Nowadays we have music playing in our homes all the time; imagine how wealthy you would have had to have been hundreds of years ago to have music playing in your house all the time. It’s an interesting thought.

So why was there this switch? What happened in our society to so drastically change our relationship with music?

It was the invention of music playing devices combined with an increase in music being made. From phonographs to radios to walkmans to CD players to cell phones, we have been listening to recorded music for about a century. And now, thanks to modern technology and streaming services, we have the option to surround ourselves with music all the time.

It’s harder to truly appreciate music when it constantly surrounds us. It’s just like anything else: if you have too much of something, it becomes repetitive, boring, and unwanted. Music is meant to evoke emotion, to inspire thought, not to be background noise twenty four hours a day, seven days a week.

Don’t get me wrong, I love to listen to music in a informal kind of way when I’m doing homework or hanging out with friends. I just think that it is also important to make time to really listen to music, and appreciate it too.

Inspirations From Harry Partch

1. uniting sound and sight to create a "single dramatic purpose"
2. using objects in ways besides their intended uses
3. challenging society's view of how music works

Daphne of the Dunes. Music by Harry Partch. Performed live by Newband. Staging, Costume Design and Choreography by Alice Farley

‘US Highball-A Musical Account of a Transcontinental Hobo Trip’ 1955. Performed by the Gate 5 Ensemble.

Harry PARTCH: Delusion of the Fury

Short Films | 17 min | 1969 | Directed by Madeline Tourtelot

Delusion of the Fury: A Ritual of Dream and Delusion, \\ Recorded at UCLA Playhouse 1969. Conducted by Danlee Mitchell, musician assembly Emil Richards.

American composer Harry Partch (1901-1974) had a musical vision for which 12-toned instruments were not enough. His objection to the standard western classical scale wasn’t so much along the philosophical lines of Schoenberg and other early 20th-century atonalists; he was mainly frustrated by the musical limitations of the equal-tempered octave, so devised a system that split the octave into 43 notes instead.

Partch’s masterpiece is the bizarre 1960s music drama Delusion of the Fury. It is outlandish and magnificent and it spits you out wanting to dive back in and experience the whole strange thing again. And if it is hardly ever staged that’s because it can’t be: it requires its very own orchestra of hand-built instruments, each one specially invented by Partch to play his unique microtonal music.

Even the names of the instruments are little poems in themselves: Eucal Blossom, Zymo-Xyl, Quadrangularis Reversum, Castor & Polux, Spoils of War. There are closely-tuned glass gongs and thin sheets of metal which, when tugged by strings, make loud wobbly noises. The Chromelodeon is a sort of harmonium that produces a mellow thrum. The heavy bass of the Marimba Eroica hits you first in the stomach then in the head, like a big wooden subwoofer. A zither-ish instrument plays a recurring spaghetti-western figure – glimmers of Partch’s childhood in remote Arizona, like heat-haze on a long horizon.

There is more to these instruments than wild names and weird sounds. What’s surprising is how, well, tonal his music often ends up sounding. 

Read more: Harry Partch – how Heiner Goebbels bought Delusion of the Fury to Edinburgh

A documentary about avant-garde composer Harry Partch. Broadcast on the BBC. 

American musical iconoclast Harry Partch believed that the 12-tone octave used for centuries in western music was fundamentally wrong, and so developed his own 43-note scale and sculpted instruments on which to play his music. Distancing himself from society, he lived a nomadic existence for much of his life, but his concept of "musical theatre" has influenced composers as diverse as Tom Waits and Philip Glass.