The first prototype is called The Notebook Fan, it distorts the sound, in this case the voice, causing it to sound more mechanical. 

The second prototype is called The Bowl, it spreads the sound, causing to seem interrupted and wavered. 

This is my secret twin sister, I apologize, she does not have a very good voice, but I did not want to be the one singing.

1. The Loud Pass filter. Designed to emulate a Low pass filter but while amplifying input in a megaphone type style.

2. The Volume button flute. Its like a recorder except the only thing it does is control volume.

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

Harry Partch: Music Studio

Short Films | 17 min | 1957 | Directed by Madeline Tourtelot

Harry Partch has been dubbed the “hobo composer” on account of his youthful wanderings during the Great Depression when he rode the railroads with other jobless Americans and found precarious work harvesting fruit. In this short 1958 documentary, though, Partch guides us through his Chicago home full of self-built musical inventions. Perhaps nodding to his itinerant past, a Japanese calligraphic inscription on the studio wall declares “though homeless, you make a shrine wherever you are”. Partch says that his version of shrines are his instruments, “unusual in size, shape and philosophic purpose,” adding “I am a philosophic music man, long ago seduced into musical carpentry.”

Along with esoteric spiritual impulses, it was a quest for different scales and micro-tonal intervals that led Partch to create such outlandish machines as the Diamond Marimba and The Gourd Tree. Sonically these metal and glass contraptions recall the tuned percussion and metallophonic instruments of Indonesian gamelan. But Partch’s actual inspiration came from the Ancient Greeks. His Chromolodeon works with the Greek enharmonic scale, while the 72-stringed Kithara is a drastic expansion upon a lyre used in Antiquity for dances and recitations of epic verse.

For the actual material out of which he fashioned his creations, though, Partch ransacked the modern world. He turned cloud-chamber bowls from the scientific laboratory into bells and repurposed brass artillery casings for an instrument he named The Spoils of Wars. Building these striking-looking and sui generis sound-machines was just the start of the artistic process for Partch, though. His compositions typically were one element in performances involving dance, costume, and mime-like theatre (see Delusion of the Fury, a 72 min film ). Like so many modernists, Partch’s true goal was to go back: to reinvent the holistic audio-visual art forms of the Ancient world, in which “sight and sound unite for a single dramatic purpose”.

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

Harry Partch (1901-1974) was an iconoclastic American composer and instrument inventor with a passion for integrating musicians, actors, and dancers in large-scale works of total-theater. He was "seduced into carpentry" by his interest in just intonation and his need to have an orchestra tuned to this system. The instruments are more than just producers of tone, however — each one has an evocative name and dramatic physical presence, and each one puts unique physical demands on the performer. In Partch's book, Genesis of a Music, he writes that the performer of the Marimba Eroica should at times "convey the vision of Ben Hur in his chariot," while a musician playing his Kithara must not "bend at the waist, like an amateur California prune picker," but instead should move with grace and athleticism in a "functional dance."Charles Corey, curator of the instruments which are currently housed at the University of Washington in Seattle, gives a tour of the instruments and the unique sounds they make and iconoclastic musical notations which Partch invented for the performers to be able to play his compositions.This event was presented on May 30, 2017, by the Pacific Northwest Section of the Audio Engineering Society in the Studio Theater at the Meany Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Washington in Seattle. Sincere thanks to their staffs and management for allowing us to be there.

HARRY PARTCH - Instrument Demos (Voice Overs by Harry)

In his 1913 book The Art of Noises, Luigi Russolo imagines a future dominated by noise. In this soundscape, noises are a colossal part of what drives culture. He wanted to incorporate the beauty of industrial noise into the properly aesthetic realm of music.

For this he devised noise-making machines that he called "intonarumori", which, through cranks, mechanical effects and the passage of air, would alter our idea of what sounds could be made into music. His growlers, cracklers and bursters (and many more) would form an orchestra that would first reflect the new world of the machine, then contribute to human development.

In the future seen from 1913, the noise-making machines are everywhere: orchestras and the old machines that hid noise from us, such as musical instruments, are redundant, part of pre-history. In a society ruled by noise, everything would begin again.

Industry is not only ever-present, it is noisier than ever, and the city becomes a perpetual symphony (for all his radical notions, ideas like "the symphony" still pre-occupied Russolo and his fellow futurists). Art and manufacturing offer a resonant dissonance (not, of course, harmony), and the noises from nature and human culture comprise a soundworld based on pistons, levers and hammers. This is a world that conjures the worst kind of noise, that of loud and unwanted sound, but for Russolo, this was just a matter of retraining and reworking our ears.

John Cage attempted something similar with his silent pieces, most famously in David Tudor's non-playing of a piano for 4 minutes and 33 seconds, known as 4'33", in 1952. In place of a concert the world intrudes, the world of all sound, something Cage tried to harness for music, so that the world could become musical.

Russolo and Cage, like Satie and Varëse, had included noises in their musical works, but these noises had been "musicalised", restructured so that the noise is dissipated.

We might want to think of noise music as a history of the use of noise (and reactions to this), going from Russolo (or Wagner, Schoenberg, etc) through the cut and pasting of the 1950s and 1960s, Iggy and the Velvets, industrial music, power electronics, and, finally, the outpouring of noise from Japan, especially in the 1990s.

https://electronicbookreview.com/essay/harry-partch-a-poets-view/

1. WE INTEND TO SING THE LOVE OF DANGER, THE HABIT OF ENERGY AND FEARLESSNESS.

2. COURAGE, BOLDNESS, AND REBELLION WILL BE THE ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS IN OUR POETRY.

3. UP TO NOW, LITERATURE HAS EXTOLLED A CONTEMPLATIVE STILLNESS, RAPTURE AND REVERIE. WE INTEND TO GLORIFY AGGRESSIVE ACTION, A RESTIVE WAKEFULNESS, LIFE AT THE DOUBLE, THE SLAP AND THE PUNCHING FIST.

F.T. MARINETTI, 1909

ARCHITECTS, SCULPTORS, PAINTERS – WE ALL MUST RETURN TO CRAFTSMANSHIP! FOR THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS “ART BY PROFESSION". THERE IS NO ESSENTIAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE ARTIST AND THE ARTISAN. THE ARTIST IS AN EXALTED ARTISAN.

WALTER GROPIUS, 1919

Manifestos challenge the status quo and present latent possibilities. Many movements like Dadaism and Futurism started out with manifestos that declared founding beliefs and set of rules that defined them.

Taking inspiration from your background research and experiments with sound, come up with your own sound manifesto following the provided guidelines:

1. Define your sound. Why does it exist? Who is it for?
2. Keep your manifesto direct and concise.
3. Be expressive and theatrical. You are making an original statement!
4. Experiment with format.

RESOURCES:

ART OF NOISES | RESOURCE TAB