The Starfighter That Plays Its Own Soundtrack

The wings are not decoration. On the MusicMachine 3, the lattice panels flanking the central pod carry the sound: vibrations from two music-box movements run down through them into a wooden soundboard, which pushes the music into the room the way a guitar body does. The starfighter is the loudspeaker.

MB&F launched the machine in July 2015, for its tenth anniversary. It was the third MusicMachine built with Reuge, the Swiss music-box maker, and the last of the line. Founder Maximilian Büsser was ten years old when Star Wars opened in 1977 — MB&F tells that story about itself — and the anniversary ran under a tagline that explains the whole object: “A creative adult is a child who survived.”

Three workshops built it

The division of labour is the luxury here. MB&F designed the machine. Reuge, with 150 years of music boxes behind it, built the two movements. The base — the part that decides how the thing actually sounds — came from JMC Lutherie, Jeanmichel Capt's workshop in the Vallée de Joux, which ordinarily builds high-end guitars and the soundboards inside them.

That base is made from resonance spruce that grew for some 350 years, laminated with modern composite — Nomex honeycomb and Kevlar. It is the thinking a luthier applies to a guitar top, scaled up to carry a six-kilo spaceship.

A mirrored pair of movements

Each side of the pod carries its own independent movement. MB&F calls the calibre 3.72: three melodies on a cylinder, 72 notes on a comb. Symmetry ruled the design, so Reuge built the pair as mirror images — one cylinder turns clockwise, the other anticlockwise. In MB&F's own words, Reuge “broke with music box convention” and inverted the movement architecture to do it.

The details keep the fiction going without breaking the engineering. The winding keys are styled as engine thrusters. The small fans that govern each cylinder's tempo read as radar dishes. Nothing is streamed or sampled: pins set into brass cylinders lift the teeth of steel combs, and the teeth ring. MB&F's specification counts 1,279 pins in the right cylinder alone — each one a millimetre long, placed by hand, its position a note somebody at Reuge decided.

A melody lasts 35 seconds, one full turn of its cylinder. Each cylinder's spring holds about 15 minutes of music. Then you wind the thrusters and go again.

Six tunes, fixed at the factory

The repertoire was chosen once and cannot change. The right cylinder plays the themes from Star Wars, Mission: Impossible and James Bond. The left plays The Godfather, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence and The Persuaders. No update is coming and no playlist extends it. What the machine knows is what it was taught at the Reuge bench — and the teaching is physical, cut into brass and steel.

The frame around it

Ninety-nine were made: 33 in white lacquer, 33 in black, 33 in chrome. The machine measures 400 by 340 by 280 millimetres and weighs about six kilos. It is desk sculpture with a power reserve.

The launch price, reported by both Hodinkee and SJX on July 13, 2015, was CHF 17,500 plus tax — CHF 18,900 with Swiss VAT in. That figure belongs to 2015: MB&F publishes no current price for the machine, and no current stock has been established. Examples surface second-hand from time to time; a black one has passed through Christie's online watch sales, listed with the same edition and construction.

Ninety-nine were made, and the edition closed a decade ago. What survives for the rest of us is the film above — two cylinders turning against each other, playing film music the slow way, one pin at a time. More stories behind the objects live on the Provenance front.