Music Machine Weirdness from Wall Drug SD

This is a video of an incredibly complicated music machine that we found at Wall Drug SD. It has, I would conservatively guess, over a thousand moving parts, all of which have to complete a painstakingly subtle task.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), each of these stringed instruments have to be tuned at least once per day. This particular machine appears to not have been tuned in months, if at all.
The result of this detuning, and unintentional 'preparedness', the music ends up coming out as a weird sort of mix between Tom Waits and Harry Partch.

Behold.

Category:

Music

Tags:

• wall
• drug
• tom
• waits
• harry
• partch
• western
• music
• machine
• mechanical

[pansatyrson]

For your tags, you forgot to list John Fahey and Jandek. Otherwise, awesome.

[fennitch]

I think Jandek is inside working the controls.

[recoverfromhydro]

Love Wall Drugs!

[teferensen]

I do love me some quarter tone oldies!

[KawhackitaRag]

Yeah this is built by Ragtime Automated Music of Ceres, CA. They are still around. They use the fretter design from the Encore Banjo, a vintage automatic instrument popular from about 1897-1905. Their wheel-style picker design is proprietary, I believe, though some old Encore patents explored this idea (although I don't think any prototypes survive). Yeah I agree it sounds horrible when it is not tuned up. Put in "encore banjo" in Youtube and you will see a good one, with piano and drums too.

[MarlinRoil]

5 Stars because I have been to Wall Drug, and want to go back. :D

[TofuPuppets]

5 more stars for no reason

[1Sunrose]

5 stars for video with the strange music.