I want to thank Jim Heyworth for his in-depth comments about this string.
His comment about the difficulty of identification arising from the
specific arrangement of the tune is well taken. One of the things that
I have found that works very well for me (using the "Up-Down" book) is
playing a music box many, many times until, when you stop at the end of
a tune, your mind sings the next song. This seems to enable your mind
to sort out the melody without the embellishments.
When you set and justify (straighten and align) the pins on a cylinder
box, you have to play the box over and over again to line up each pin
with each comb tooth. By the time you are half-way through the comb,
you can sing every tune on the box (assuming you can sing! :-)
One of the Web sites I have found really useful to double-check tune
identification is the Classical MIDI Archives:
http://www.prs.net/midi.html#index
This site has an unbelievable amount and assortment of classical music
which you can play on your computer. Each piece is indexed by composer
and completely identified. Now we need the next step - being able to
sort them with some form of "Up-Down" or "Do-Re-Mi" to be able to start
from an unknown and go to a known. Any ideas?
Beatrice Robertson
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