Today was the exhibition for my Year 9 capstone, 2 June, and the whole project fits in a white box you can hold in two hands. It is a music box, but not the kind that only knows one lullaby forever. I chose a song I actually like, edited it into MIDI, and then turned those notes into holes on a strip of card. When you feed the paper through and turn the crank, the pins drop into the holes and the comb plays the tune back. It is a little like a phonograph, except the record is a piece of homework I cut myself.
I used to think a song lived in a phone. You press play, and the sound arrives as if it had always been there. MIDI is less polite than that. On the screen it looks like a piano roll: dots sitting on a grid, each one a pitch and a moment in time. I put that screen into my presentation slides, next to the real paper, because I wanted people to see that the holes and the dots were the same song in two languages. If I put a note too early, the melody leans forward. If I stack too many notes in one place, the little comb cannot play them all, because a paper music box only has so many teeth. I had to thin the arrangement until it sounded simple enough to be true.
The next step felt almost old-fashioned. I printed the pattern onto card with a grey grid, then punched the holes, one by one. A wrong hole is not a wrong pixel. You cannot undo it with a finger. I wasted one strip by putting a run of notes too close together, and the paper tore when I tried to fix it. The second strip was slower. I checked the MIDI against the card the way I check a Maths answer against the question, except the answer here was a sound I would not hear until the paper went into the box.
At the table today someone else turned the crank and I held the lid. The paper curled like a small white snake. For a second nothing happened, and I thought I had punched the silence. Then the first notes came out, thin and metallic, and I recognised the song even though it no longer had drums or a singer. It was the skeleton of the piece, the part that can survive being turned into holes.
I keep thinking about price and value, which is a habit I cannot switch off since Business started. A shop music box is cheap and finished. You buy a melody that someone else chose, and it will be that melody until the spring dies. Mine cost more time than money. The MIDI file was free. The card was ordinary. The expensive part was sitting there, deciding which notes were allowed to live. That is a kind of editing I like: not making the song fancier, but making it small enough to become physical.
People kept asking what the paper was for, as if a grid of holes could not possibly be music. I wanted to say that a lot of the music we stream is also a grid, only the holes are invisible and the crank is a thumb. I did not say that. I just asked if they wanted to turn it again.
I am glad this was the last big project of junior high. It sits next to my other subjects without asking permission. Music is the feeling. Maths is the spacing. Business is the question of what you give up to make one version of a song instead of another. ESL is me trying to explain all of that without making it sound like a manual.
The box is closed now, with the paper rolled beside it. If I want the song, I have to put the strip in and turn the handle. I like that it will not play itself. I have to mean it.