Charles Hind's Music Boxes and General Music Box Project Update and Book Review: Karp's "The Enchanted Ear"
By Larry Smith
Marc Kaufman:
> Charles Hind has built a beautiful music box. The metal is gorgeous, the
> wood box is full of inlay. This was his second(!) music box project. The
> first was a Maniville (hand cranked). His design was conservative: three
> tunes with tooth tips 0.100" apart. Larger than average cylinder pins.
How big was the cylinder? Did he go for something like an 11" antique reproduction, or did he stick to the 6" modern Reuge style size? I notice Reuge seems to have standardized on 3 tunes per cylinder, perhaps he was using their parts bin?
What did he do for a spring-motor? Did he wind his own, or buy it, and if the latter from where? I realize you might not have all these details, but if you do, or have some guesses based on what you saw, I'd be very interested.
> >I didn't run into any _known_ subscribers
> Don't I count as a known subscriber?
Well, there is known and there is _known_. I didn't talk to anyone that I realized was a subscriber at the time. :)
General Music Box Project Update:
I have made some progress in getting my workshop set up, but I still have a way to go. I've done some research on tools, however, and I think that tools to build music boxes are available, but you need to be clever about getting them and adapting them. Little will work right out of the box.
Mechanisms: S. Rose claims to sell very large and powerful spring motors, but the size needed for a decent music box is not a standard catalog item, and I've not yet seen a reasonably large motor. I will follow up with them when I get a chance. I've located a book that tells how to machine combs for musical boxes, which Nancy will be mailing me sometime after she gets her head screwed back on after the show (couple weeks I expect ;) as well as some tangential, but fascin- ating information on orchestrion construction in the "Orchestrion Builder's Manual" - which I also ordered, I'll review it here when I've seen more of it.
I've located a supplier of Sherline tools adapted for computer control. Sherlines are legendary for high accuracy and repeatability, but they have small work areas - good for all the tiny parts a music box needs, but too small to work _directly_ on the base plate or to drill and pin the cylinder. However, I think it may be possible to add jigs to one that will enable large pieces to be worked through the unit under computer control that might enable the lathe to drill and pin an entire cylinder. I intend to follow this path when I get to that point, but if this works, then I will essentially have a gen- eral midi-to-hardware device that could churn out high-quality cylin- ders very rapidly compared to the traditional way. Does anyone think this might be a useful/profitable sideline? Barry Johnson seems to have found a niche with repro disks, but I haven't seen that much for interchangeable cylinders, nor are they as standardized. How much would a custom music box be worth to people? Points to ponder. It seems like a waste to build a device capable of building hundreds, or thousands, or cylinders and just use it to make a half-dozen for my own projects, but I doubt I could produce even those few cylinders any other way.
Boxes: We're just talking carpentry here, but _master_ carpentry. Those fancy boxes are not trivial to reproduce. There are some intaglio kits that might produce nice looking boxes without looking like a _reproduction_, but the one I ordered arrived with half the parts missing and no templates or directions - $40 for a box of scrap wood. I'd be careful about ordering such stuff again. It is fairly easy to find strips of veneer, but I've not located a supplier of sheets. Given the cost and availability of the kind of hardwoods we like to see on a music box, this is the only way to go nowadays, but I wonder how much is sold in sheets and how much just goes for edging. Anyone have some suggestions?
Music: Most of the progress regarding musical arrangements has been in this list, so I won't go into huge detail. The current plan, which has a number of interested parties that we're going to try to organize, is to use a genetic algorithm to construct a midi file that when played sounds like the input analog wave form. How good this will be depends on a lot of factors. For getting midi descriptions of music box music based on music box recordings, I suspect pretty good. For getting music box _arrangements_ of non-music box recordings, I can't guess - but, the only alternative will require a master's degree in digital signal processing, which happens to be a fairly esoteric branch of computer science with which I am not familiar, so it's worth a try.
Other stuff - a book review:
I think I mentioned earlier that I picked up a copy of Larry Karp's book "The Enchanted Ear" about his introduction and experiences in the music box world. I found it an easy and fast read, and partic- ularly enjoyed his description of "Willy" the music-box hacker (though I, too, agonized at the death of that blameless little music box) and found his story about the "ultimate" music box especially interesting, since, as it turns out (and I don't really think this is a spoiler, but consider yourselves warned) the "ultimate" box _was_ a computer, doing an arrangement of Beethoven's 5th symphony - the _whole_ sym- phony, not an abridged version. I've calculated that a music box about three feet long, with four rotary cylinders each about five inches in diameter, could play the described "enchanting" arrangement. He mentioned he was working with this computer type to produce a version of the 9th symphony as well. This fellow may have a lot of useful in- put into new musical boxes, though he is fairly non-computer-literate himself, I wonder if we couldn't get him onto this list. I intend to try to contact him and see about it.
regards,
Larry |
(Message sent Mon 30 Oct 1995, 14:53:23 GMT, from time zone GMT-0500.) |
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Book, Box, Boxes, Charles, Ear, Enchanted, General, Hind's, Karp's, Music, Project, Review, Update |
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