Musical Instruments

This group gathers mechanical engineering inventions built to produce or assist in producing music through purely mechanical means, such as a self-playing or mechanically assisted musical instrument driven by gears, bellows, strings or another mechanism rather than by an electrical circuit. Their shared work is generating musical sound through mechanism, as distinct from the electrical and electronic instruments and audio equipment gathered elsewhere in the atlas, and from the printing and media devices that reproduce an image or a recording rather than perform live.