Ever since I was a little girl I have enjoyed music boxes. It fascinated me that something that small could produce just beautiful music. As a child I took piano lessons and tried to figure out the mechanics behind how the piano worked. Trying to compare that to the music box, it just didn’t make sense. I would watch when the piano tuner came to tune my piano. I found out that the piano used strings and padded hammers to make the sounds. I did realize a difference in how they piano played verses that music box. A music box only played the melody one note at a time, where a piano could play much more than just the melody. So the principle behind a music box was different than the piano.
I watched a player piano once and realized that the mechanics behind that made more sense to transfer to a music box. Only it was on a much smaller scale. The idea of a rotating cylinder converting just the melody instead of all of the parts that a player piano used made sense.
So how did one tune this rotating cylinder to produce the melody that it played? Could the movements that are used in a music box be applied to other items? Or maybe the movements from another item what inspired the music box.
When I thought about the music boxes that I had or had seen, I realized that there were music boxes that were more than just a music box. They were connected to clocks and some toys. The music box still had to be “programmed” to play its tune automatically. I use the word programmed because it had to be automatic, but it by no means has anything to do with computers. An old fashioned music box is not a computer, nor does it have computer parts. What it does have is pins that stick out from a rotating cylinder. This cylinder is moved by a spring or by clockwork. That would explain the need to wind up a music box so that it plays its melody.
I did decide that while I did learn something about the workings of a music box, I was just as enchanted with just the reality of the music coming from the music box. Some times the why isn’t as important as it seems.
