Automatic Player for Disk Music Boxes
By Karl Petersen
Ever since I pinned my first disk for a music box, I have thought it a wonderful idea to be able to use an independent player for a music box by which the instrument can be played manually or through other means. This requires that the star wheels be rotated smoothly and gently at approximately the right speed so that the damping and release are similar to that produced by the passing disk.
If anyone would send me a Stella mechanism and a few reference disks, I would gladly draw up an arrangement which would fill the requirements mentioned.
My concept is to use a roller-mechanical action which we have heard described before, and which is most familiarly used in old IBM type-bar typewriters in an astonishingly noisy and complex embodiment. A roller is in continuous motion. A trigger brings a mechanical device into contact with the roller. The device takes power from the roller and transmits it to the musical escapement. The device returns and is ready to play again. This is especially well suited to the musical box since the speed of the device is precisely controlled, it must fully return before it can repeat, and it cannot be teased into repeating early.
The music box is the only acoustic percussion instrument, to my knowledge, which has not had a manual version, all the others having started out as manual instruments, becoming automated as an afterthought. The celeste, harpsichord and clavichord are often used to simulate the music box in the musical literature, but what a shadow of the true sound these instruments give, however fine they may be in their own right.
Please file this one away as a Disclosure of Invention, so the Patent Office has its properly dated evidence and they can start looking through old Swiss patents to predate this.
OK, where's that Stella?
Karl.
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(Message sent Mon 5 Aug 1996, 03:35:42 GMT, from time zone GMT-0600.) |
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