Music box

What it means

The music box is a mechanical musical instrument in which a cylinder or disc studded with pins rotates and, with its pins, plucks a row of tuned metal teeth. Each tooth sounds at a particular pitch, so the fixed arrangement of the pins determines a particular melody.

The cylinder is usually driven by a wound spring mechanism, similar to a clock movement.

Musical use

Music boxes became popular especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Switzerland and later also in Germany, at first as precious one-off pieces, later as more widely available mass-produced items, often built into jewelry boxes, clocks, or standalone pieces of furniture.

With interchangeable cylinders or perforated plates (later also perforated discs), several melodies could be kept ready for the same instrument, which makes the music box an early forerunner of later mechanical and electronic music-playback devices.

The music box should be distinguished from the barrel organ, which sounds pipes by means of air currents, and from the mechanical musical instrument in the broader sense, which can also include more complex mechanisms such as player pianos or orchestrions.

Performance practice

Wind a music box's spring evenly and not too forcefully, to avoid damage. Listen deliberately for the characteristic, slightly metallic sound of the teeth, which differs clearly from acoustic or electronic sound generators.