Dear Frank and Robbie,

I have been experimenting with a program call Autoscore, which will
notate music on the computer screen as it is played into the microphone.
So far, it works only minimally on music boxes.  However, I think this
could be improved vastly, given some experimenting with microphone
setups and tweaking the program. Frank Metzger has an amplifier box that
he uses to demonstrate miniature music boxes at shows (when you can't
hear anything but monkey organs otherwise) that I think could be adapted
to provide the sound source. The problem with this program is that is
can only record one note at a lime, so sometimes you get a harmony not
instead of melody. I just upgraded my computer and added a new
Soundblaster Awe 32 sound card. The programs that come with this card
include a similar notation program. I know that Robbie and some of the
others have been using this program for a while. Is recording the
"score" from a music box possible? Let's work on that first.

Robbie, there are many books with musical themes in many formats, as Dr.
Metzger mentioned. There is even one referred to as the Up-Down book,
because all musical themes listed are broken into whether the note
following is higher, lower, or the same. It sounds silly, but I have
gotten quite good at finding tunes with it. But if we could record the
music from music boxes, then make sound bites of all these millions of
song themes in the many books, could a program be written to match them
with a computer??

Now we have a subject that will bring the music box people out of the
lurking stage. Identifying song titles on music boxes with lost
tunecards is one of the most frustrating and time consuming things we do
in music box restoration and research.  If there is some way that this
could be electronically assisted, the research on dating, musicology,
and compositions recorded on mechanical music machines would be advanced
in a major leap!

Computer programmer folks - is this possible?

Beatrice