In an interesting example of fair-use, WalkingTacosDubs creates renditions of disney musical scenes without accompaniment. The results are sometimes more authentic and disarmingly intimate, but sometimes it is flat. Let’s look at Moana’s “How Far I’ll Go” (here it is normal, with accompaniment) compared with Frozen’s “Let it go” (normal form here).

How Far I’ll Go

The official rendition has a very simple instrumental portion, keeping beat a with drums and ornamenting with some acoustic guitar. The music-less dub is very well-done, emphasizing the tropical texture and island community. The added sounds of feet on the and, of unfurling the sails and touching the mast; we hear an excellent case of “less is more.”

Let it Go

On the other hand we have the ear-worm Let it Go. As opposed to the small, close feeling of “How Far I’ll Go,” this song is set up as a fantastic, grandiose magical scene conveying pivotal decisions. Musically it begins with sweeping panoramas and a matching instrumental prelude setting the stage, and the monumental music exchanges with visual magical explosions. Stripping the music from this scene defuses it of its momentous grandeur.

The purpose of accompaniment

Comparing these we see how much the story and scene set-up is tied in to the purpose of the music. There are practical purposes, such as the way stripping the instrumentals makes the scene-changes less fluid; but there are also story-telling purposes that we see in how the instruments are a vehicle for telling stories like Frozen’s magical fantasy.