[ Ref. "Damaged Music Box Case", by Tim Kramer ]

I seemed to have caused some confusion with my description of a
"Mandoline" box.  First of all the story starts with the tune card
stating "Mandoline".  I'm not an expert on tune cards, but I can say
that they're not always accurate.

I believe that the tune card is original to the mechanism [of Tim
Kramer's music box] but the easiest way to verify that is to listen
to the tunes of the cylinder and compare them with the songs listed
on the card.  If you recognize the title of a song and it sounds
completely different on the box, it might be that someone added the
tune card.

The tune card looks old enough to be original, but with the recent
stories I've been hearing about automatia being made to look old,
it may or may not be.  I'd really need to see it up close to have
a personal opinion, and yes, people do go that far to fake things.

Let's assume for a while that the tune card is original to the
machine.  It still doesn't tell us anything.  I read a very interesting
article in the MBSI Journal about a box that was stamped "Nicolle
Freres" -- yes, that's right, with 2 "L"s.  Music box dealers in the
1890s also knew all the tricks.  Many boxes were sold with tune cards
not from the manufacturer but from the dealer himself wanting to sell
it for a bit more money, and there are a lot of forgeries in tune
cards.

Now to my point -- In general a piano has 88 notes and they are laid
out on the keyboard for all of us to see.  The interesting thing I
discovered when I took apart my first music box was that, although it
has 91 teeth, the lowest 3 together make a chromatic chord (C-E-G).
There are many notes that would be on a piano that are missing and
several that are repeated 2-3 times.

I'm sorry that I can't tell you exactly how many octaves it encompasses
but I leave it with the fact that it's many less than a piano.  The
reason for this is that a piano needs all the notes to play all the
music.  For any given song, you may not need all the notes on your
piano and they would then be left out if you were making a music box.

I'm not going to tell you to plunk the teeth by hand to find out how
many there are with the same tone (in fact do not do this under any
circumstances!)

Now to the cylinder of a music box:  Many cylinders are scribed around
the circumference of the cylinder at regular intervals.  This scribe
is the alignment of the cylinder for each tooth.  Then you will notice
that between the scribes that there are pins scattered about.  If,
however, you would add more scribes for each tune (i.e., a 4-tune box
you would add 3 additional scribes), you would see that all the pins
would fall on one of the new lines you added.

Here you need some spatial imagination: you need to see in adjacent
teeth the note being repeated across the same (imaginary) tune line.
In a Mandoline box, they're not hard to see as they happen often and
they are repeated 6-8 times.

By the way, I read that the maximum repeating rate that was pleasing
to the ear was decided as 8 times per second and that for the physical
properties of the teeth they would only repeat them once per second,
thus you need 8 teeth [playing the same tone] to get the best effect.

Eliyahu Shahar