The Cosmic Music Box

The project started off by acoustically recording 21 tine actuations from a disassembled music box mechanism placed on a wooden sounding board using both conventional condenser and contact microphones.

The sound of the clockwork motor and air brake mechanisms was also captured. A synthesized halo effect was created to blend with the tines by capturing several beating sine waves from a 1960’s tube-based dual tone generator which were fed through the filter stages of a Minimoog with the filter in near resonance.

Effects

A second page was developed to permit the user to dial in various effects such as chorus, phaser, delay and reverb…

A user interface was devised to implement a randomised delay feature between two groups of acoustic tine instruments to create a plink effect and to blend the halo and motor effects together to form The Cosmic Music Box…