10 Songs for the 30 Note Music Box

The 30-note music box with paper tape is a charming mechanical instrument that plays melodies encoded on a strip of punched paper. As the tape moves across a steel comb, each hole in the tape triggers a metal tooth to vibrate. The comb acts like a multi-pronged tuning fork, with each of its thirty steel teeth tuned to a different note. Longer teeth produce lower notes because they vibrate more slowly, while shorter teeth create higher notes due to faster vibrations. These vibrations generate the musical tones that make up a melody.

Music boxes have been delighting listeners since the 18th century. The sound they produce is shaped by key musical properties: pitch, which relates to the fundamental frequency and its harmonics, and timbre, which is influenced by the strength and resonance of these harmonics. Each tooth on the comb generates a rich harmonic spectrum when it vibrates. The wooden casing and design of the music box amplify certain frequencies, giving it a distinctive, resonant tone. While digital simulations can approximate these sounds, the authentic spectrum of tones can only truly be produced by a physical instrument.

I’ve created ten songs for the 30-note music box using a Silhouette cutting machine, especially with my grandchildren in mind, who love listening to music. I believe both kids and adults would enjoy playing these tunes. It makes a thoughtful and unique gift for birthdays, anniversaries, or weddings.

Making Paper Music for your 30 Note Music Box 

The music from the website, Music Box Maniacs is cut into sections in the Silhouette software of approximately 10 inches long (to accommodate an 8 1/2 x 11 piece of 110 lb cardstock). The strips of music are cut on the diagonal.  After the music is cut with the Silhouette paper cutter, I then taped the sections together to make one continuous strip.  The holes where the tape are located, are punched again to complete the 30-note paper tape.

I made 10 songs of paper tape music using my Silhouette.  The directions to make the paper tape is exactly the same as making paper tape for the 15 note music box.  The difference is that the width of the paper is 2.75 inches for the 30 note music box. Please visit this blog posting to see how to make the paper tape music with the Silhouette. https://papercraftetc.blogspot.com/2019/11/how-to-make-paper-tape-music-for-15.html

The 30 note songs that I created for my music box are:

1. Bach- Crab Canon

2. Minuet in G - Bach

3. Tchaikovsky - Waltz of the flowers

4. Beethoven - Tempest

5. Easter Parade

6. Fur Elise

7. It's a Small World

8. Entry of the Gladiators - Julius Fucik

9. Carol of the Bells

10. Brahm's Lullaby

Here is the .Studio file for the above songs.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zpk_O8smhZ3kIZAwewH9abrGd23CDZlY/view?usp=sharing

Here is the SVG.  Zoom out to see the entire file.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/19mCDahN9LTn8Q7bNE8jLhOpkwb6EEKh6/view?usp=sharing

The Crab Canon as a Möbius Strip – A 30-Note Music Box Experiment

The Crab Canon as a Möbius Strip – A 30-Note Music Box Experiment

A few years ago, I created paper tape music for my 15-note music box and shared those projects here:

•  30 Songs for 15-Note Music Box

•  25 Songs for Christmas: A Unique Advent Calendar

During that time, I also purchased a 30-note music box, but I never got around to making any music for it, until now. 

Recently, a video of J.S. Bach’s Crab Canon appeared in my YouTube feed, and it immediately caught my attention, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUHQ2ybTejU In this piece, one voice plays the melody from beginning to end, while a second voice plays the same melody in reverse, starting at the end and working backwards
. The two lines meet in the middle and continue on their respective paths, creating a beautifully symmetrical and harmonious effect.

This reminded me of a project that I did a while ago where I created a Möbius strip out of Mozart Sonata No. 16 in C, Making a Möbius Strip.  I thought, why not do the same with Bach's Crab Canon.  It would be interesting to recreate the Crab Canon on the 30 note music box as a Möbius strip. 

A Möbius strip is a shape made by twisting a strip of paper once and taping the ends together. It looks simple, but it only has one side and one edge. If you draw a line along the surface, you’ll come back to where you started but on the “other side” without flipping over. It’s a loop with a twist. On a Möbius strip, walking forward eventually becomes going in reverse, without ever crossing an edge.

The Crab Canon is like a musical Möbius strip. It is a melody that turns back on itself, played forward by one voice and backward by another at the same time. Though it is carefully composed rather than improvised, it shows how music can maintain harmony and coherence even when reversed. This works because the notes remain within the same musical key, preserving many of the relationships between tension and release.

While I can’t recreate the full listening experience of both voices playing at once since I only have one 30-note music box. I can produce the Crab Canon as a Möbius strip. This format captures the essence of the piece in a physical, visual way.

The Crab Canon paper tape will be included in the next blog posting with other 30-note songs.