A Spectacular Spin On The Traditional Music Box

Swedish musician and bandleader of Wintergatan, Martin Molin, mesmerised us all earlier in March when he used 2000 cascading steel marbles, tracks, pulley devices, perfectly carved wooden parts and funnels to create his own mind-blowing musical instrument. Creatively-crazy minds like Molin’s rarely sit still and he’s back with two new homemade instruments of his creation, and we’re so glad that he is. He refashioned a 4-year-old manual music box into a more complex creation to improve the instruments resilience and sound quality. Like traditional music boxes, the tinkering sounds are the result of hand-punched programming paper being fed through the mechanism through rollers and a motor, with a paper-pulling machine made out of Lego Technics components that, as explained by Gizmag, are “connected  to the motor by metal cogs and chain. A laptop power brick plugged into the mains powers the motor.”

A large collapsible birch plywood wheel carries the punched programming paper wrapped around it which is then pulled through the music box by the Lego paper-puller, giving us the twinkling and tinkering sounds of a traditional music box but with a new twist. Molin gives us a demonstration of these insane feats of engineering in a new video posted by Wintergatan where he sets up the box and plays along on what he calls a Modulin, a kind of cross between an accordion, theremin and a violin. We’ve run out of words to explain just how crazy, complex and ingenious these instruments are, so we’ve posted below a video of Molin performing his hauntingly beautiful original composition titled All Was Well, filmed and edited by Hannes Knutsson, to speak for us. Scroll on for photographs giving you a closer look at the instruments and a video in which Molin explains his creation.

Read more about Molin’s creation and how they work in this article by Gizmag.