Expressive timing and mechanical instruments: exploring temporal idiomaticity in some music box performances

Drawing on earlier work in digital musicology that analysed beat onset data to create timing profiles for recorded performances, this research addresses the question of what kinds of timing data might be produced by a hand-cranked mechanical instrument. Mechanical instruments have been studied as part of the pre-history of recording technologies, but have not typically been considered seriously as performance media. However, a prominent tradition of nineteenth-century street performance – organ grinding – relied on mechanical instruments. If a hand-cranked mechanical instrument does not produce a totally regular rendition, then what might such a performance look like in terms of temporal variation? My hypothesis was that different players would produce different kinds of patterns, and that some of these patterns could be related to conventions of expressive performance. Six participants played two extracts, by Scott Joplin and Fredric Chopin, on a music box. I extracted onset bpm data using Sonic Visualiser and used a combination of Self-Organising Maps and manual data analysis to broadly group the different patterns of emphasis in these recordings and six others by professional pianists for comparison. The data showed that several participants employed phrase-arching, and also indicated not only 1) that different players demonstrated different tendencies in terms of temporal variation and beat emphasis but also 2) that different tendencies emerged among music box players across the two repertoire samples. I argue that these results suggest that it is possible to play both idiomatically and expressively with a hand-cranked mechanical instrument.