Meeting Muro Box, Writing for a New Instrument
For the premiere of my new piece, I wanted a sound that felt both intimate and slightly uncanny — like memory turning a corner and catching the light. That impulse led me to Muro Box, where CEO Dr. Tsai and CTO Mr. Feng welcomed our team, rolled up their sleeves, and let the machines sing.
Before we spoke of aesthetics, they unveiled the N40, a programmable mechanical music box with a forty-note chromatic range. Unlike traditional single-tune mechanisms, the N40 is built for composition and performance: it connects to MIDI through DIN-5 and USB-C (host/device), and syncs with their app for editing and playlists. In short, it’s a music box you can actually write for — line by articulated line, timbre by stubborn, beautiful timbre.
That capability didn’t appear overnight. As we listened, Sherry and Feng shared the long arc from their early app-controlled prototypes to today’s instrument: a community of users composing and exchanging melodies, and an engineering journey that keeps opening musical doors instead of closing them.
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From a classical composer’s standpoint, this matters. We don’t ask an instrument to be everything; we learn its voice and compose into it. History offers many precedents: when pianists lose the use of the right hand, composers create left-hand repertoire that transforms limitation into vocabulary. That was the lens I offered Muro Box: your instrument already speaks with conviction — let’s write music that listens to it first, and then extends it.
In my new work, the N40 isn’t a novelty cameo; it’s a partner. Its mechanical articulation — that almost tactile pluck of the comb — traces lines that might feel sentimental in a string section but here become lucid, lightly percussive, and strangely human. Some passages are first drafted in MIDI to shape rhythm and register, then re-scored on the device itself, because the machine’s breath — its gear train, inertia, the micro-rubato of moving parts — reshapes how phrases land in a hall.
What stayed with me wasn’t only the technology. It was the honesty. Sherry and Feng have fielded years of feedback — some generous, some impossible — and their response has been to build, listen, and build again. Standing in that workshop, with the N40 ticking a quiet ostinato, I felt the rare clarity that comes when invention and music pull in the same direction. Our conversation naturally turned to the future. My premiere is just one dialogue with this instrument; many more are waiting to be written.
The concert “Eternal Salvation 永恆的救贖”, presented as the Mysterium Musicum 15th Anniversary Concert, will feature the world premiere of Theory of Materialization on September 29, 2025, at 19:30 in the National Recital Hall, Taipei, Taiwan.
More Info: https://www.opentix.life/event/1933378033910919169
