The great twentieth-century composer Pierre Boulez noted that the history of music is "littered with corpses: superfluous or over-complicated inventions, incapable of being integrated into the context demanded by the musical ideas of the age which produced them. " With the rise of the modern, scientific age came the rise of the machine. As in the earliest ages, people used new technology to create music, particularly devices to mechanically produce music with little or no human participation. The definition of mechanical musical instrument is arbitrary at best since most musical instruments use some kind of levers (e.g., woodwind instruments) or pistons (e.g., brass instruments). However, many instruments that in some way employ mechanisms, from the marvelous to the bizarre, survive to this day.

Some of the first examples of or self-playing instruments date from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the form of...