What Are the Different Types of Music Boxes?

Music boxes, or musical boxes as they are known in Britain, are small automated instruments that play music by the plucking of teeth on a tuned steel comb. That definition covers an assortment of music box types, but throughout music box history, there have predominantly been two types of traditional music boxes: cylinder music boxes and disc music boxes. Cylinder Music Boxes Cylinder music boxes were very popular during the 19th Century. On cylinder music boxes, music was programmed or studded onto a metal cylinder using thousands of small pins that, as the cylinder rotated, would be plucked by a tuned steel music comb.

Cylinder music boxes are renowned for the unmatched quality of their music. Most cylinder music boxes were made in Switzerland, where their makers could draw upon the tradition of excellent craftsmanship displayed by the Swiss clock-making industry.

Because of the labor required in their production, cylinder music boxes were very expensive. They were also only able to play the tunes originally programmed on the cylinder.

Disc Music Boxes
Disc music boxes were invented in Germany in the late 19th Century and almost immediately surpassed cylinder music boxes in popularity. Disc music boxes offered two major advantages: they were inexpensive, and the cheaply produced metal discs allowed disc music box owners to purchase new tunes when they grew tired of older ones.

The changeable discs on disc music boxes worked via holes or projections that caused a wheel to rotate and pluck the music comb. These discs were often sized 2 feet or more in diameter. One of the interesting features of disc music boxes was that you could actually watch the spatial dimensions of the music as it played and as the comb plucked out its machine borne yet ethereal music.