Your first reaction is "Huh?"

Hedy Lamarr (yes, the "Extase" Hedy Lamarr) is being given a "Bulbie"
award at the Invention Convention in Pasadena this year.  In 1940, she
and avant-garde musician George Antheil jointly developed a method for
protecting US radio-guided torpedoes from enemy attempts to jam them.
The concept involved a method of synchronized frequency-hopping.
While this technology languished at the time, it was re-explored after
the patents expired and has come into wide use today under the name
"spread spectrum" transmission.

Lamarr was wed as a teenage to Austrian arms maker Fritz Mandl,
who was so possessive of her that she attended with him many meetings
involving the discussion of arms technology.  She left Austria in the
late 30's, met Louis B. Mayer in London, and the rest is history.

At a dinner party in Hollywood, she and Antheil got into a
conversation that wound its way around to an idea she had for
protecting transmitted signals by sequentially moving from one
frequency to another.  Antheil, who was a wildly experimental
composer, had some experience in automatic control systems.  He once
scored a composition for 16 synchronized player pianos (you're getting
warmer...), two electrically driven airplane propellers, four
xylophones, four bass drums and a siren.  He and Lamarr applied for
the patent, but the concept was ignored by the military.  Today,
frequency-hopping is commonly used, for technologies like cellular
phones and military security.

So dear readers, you ask what has this to do with mechanical music?
The original method of frequency control used paper rolls for both the
transmitter and receiver, with identical patterns to match the
split-second hops in radio frequencies.  The number of frequencies
used was 88.

        --Paraphrased from the Los Angeles Times, Aug. 30, 1997