Toop sees the emphasis on "little instruments and non-instruments (transistor radios, contact microphones amplifying tiny sounds or surface noises extracted from tables, beards [!], cheese graters, etc.)" as representative of a 1960s-70s "drive to democratise music, to allow access to unskilled players (including children), [to] draw sound from instruments rather than subjugate them to systems, [to] open the music up to chance events and create a sense of collectively organised community as an attempted break from hard professionalism" (133-4)
see: "black American improvisers such as Don Cherry and the Art Ensemble of Chicago [and] their European and white American counterparts in AMM, Musica Electronica Viva [MEV], Joseph Holbrook, Music Improvisation Company, Nuova Consonanze and the Spontaneous Music Ensemble"