👉 Okay, let’s tackle that wonderfully prickly little thing called…the musicbox! Now, traditionally when you hear "ornate, maybe a bit Victorian, probably wind-up and terribly pretty," yes, absolutely. That's the starting point for most folks. And honestly? They aren't entirely wrong.
But let’s be brutally, wonderfully real. Technically, a musicbox isn't just a pretty box that plays pretty tunes. It is, essentially, an exquisitely contained and slightly neurotic little machine of miniature torture. You crank it – this almost certainly involves a wrist of some sort being aggressively wrestled into a position you probably regret shortly thereafter. And in doing so, you unleash a tiny, repeating, usually terribly insistent loop onto the world. The mechanics behind these loops are… let’s just say they involve a great amount of precisely-cut, incredibly small, and frankly quite alarming gearing that somehow manages to produce a recognisable melody. There's almost certainly a crank somewhere that feels the very slight disappointment of your efforts. You, it seems, have doomed this tiny, whirring prisoner to an eternity in the service of… whatever you wound it with. Basically, it’s like giving a badger a very small, repetitive, and slightly shrill job, forever and always. It's a contained, mechanical melodrama! --- Now, here's that unsettling sentence I was threatening earlier: ’
