Alain

March 2025

When I was four years old my grandfather, Maurice Klat, gave my brother and me each a stuffy. Mine was yellow, my brother’s pink, and we named them after our middle names, which for me was Alain at the time (now Anglicized "Alan"). My grandfather died later that year and Alain slept in my bed until I was 17, when we moved to another house. I assumed my parents threw him away at some point in the move and I missed him.

Twenty years later I was poking through boxes under my mom’s stairs and found Alain! It was probably the single happiest surprise moment of my life. He even still had his corduroy vest my mom had made him when I was a kid. Alain had a music box, but the key no longer turned and I’d forgotten what song it even played. I assumed it was some popular song in the 1960s like Dr. Zhivago or Moon River.

Last month I decided to replace the music box.

I opened him up and removed the destroyed foam stuffing:

The music box was mysteriously full of the foam stuffing:

I have no idea how so much foam got in there, the box was well-sealed! I pulled out the foam with plyers:

I carefully cleaned and oiled the music box, but it was rusted solid:

I don’t now how moisture got in there. It was important to me to figure out the song, so I took eleven photos of the cylinder bumps:

I typed them into a text file, like this:

 *

  * *

   * *

    * *

 *

*      *
        *
      *
     *
  * *

And (of course) wrote a program to play them. The song was not remotely recognizable. There were many degrees of freedom: I didn’t know which direction the cylinder turned, I didn’t know how the comb was oriented or aligned on the cylinder (because I’d taken the whole thing apart), I didn’t know how to express octaves in the music library I was using (tone.js), and, worst of all, I didn’t know what notes were played by each tine of the comb.

I tried all the combinations but nothing played a recognizable tune. I then realized that some tines were playing the same note, so that they could be hit in quick succession while letting the first note ring. Once I allowed for that possibility, Frère Jacques jumped out:

Note the two duplicate tines (C4 and G4) that are played in quick succession.

I bought a replacement music box from Etsy and re-stuffed him with Poly-Fil:

My wife Jen sewed him up and added a button to the vest:

And he’s now back where he belongs:

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