[LAA] MIDI programmed music box

At the Linux Audio Conference 2014 in Karlsruhe [1] there was an excursion to the museum of mechanical music instruments in Bruchsal. [2] In the museum they sold music boxes as a souvenir that can be programmed by punch tapes. [3] I wrote a simple Haskell program that converts a MIDI file to the punch tape. [4] As an example I arranged a song of a colleague for the music box. [5,6,7] Unfortunately, the music box is restricted to whole tones (i.e. no "black keys") and it cannot play the same note again in a short time interval. My prefered solution would be to print the graphics on an empty punch tape, but I could not obtain an empty one. They are only sold with a printed grid. Furthermore the original punch tapes are not made of paper but of plastic. I do not know whether you can print on it using a plain laser or ink jet. I might try thick paper instead but I suspect that it will wear out quickly. However I already know that my laser printer cannot handle the length of the original stripes. Thus I printed the graphics with original width but shrunken length to regular paper and transfered the dots from there to the punch tape manually. [1] http://lac.linuxaudio.org/2014/ [2] http://www.dmm-bruchsal.de/ [3] http://www.amazon.de/Spieluhr/dp/B001WNZOVO/ [4] https://hackage.haskell.org/package/midi-music-box [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjnM-aRoYic [6] http://www.amazon.de/Schlafaepfel/dp/B003IDM06I/ [7] http://hub.darcs.net/thielema/livesequencer-example/browse/Herbst.hs