If you’ve ever looked inside a music box, or owned one with exposed mechanics you’ve no doubt seen the cylindrical mechanism that produces the music. Similar to that of a player piano as well, now it has been reimagined into a tool to compose digitally.

A Bill Moggridge design award winning project, XOXX Composer was designed by Axel Bluhme a Swedish interactive designer. XOXX uses much the same principal of the music box’s mechanics, except instead of only being able to play one song ad infinitum, you can compose new tracks in real time.

A ball bearing placed on the cylinder as it rotates at one rotation per second, is picked up by a sensor as the and translated to a beat. As with any drum machine or you can have the ball bearings represent any sound you assign to it, using one of 8 platters.

Each platter can be assigned up to 16 ball bearings, with knobs for pitch, and volume for each as well. A physical way to compose digital music with MIDI out that can be used with just about any audio program.  XOXX has a deskktop application which comes with an ‘extensive’ sample library .

A mailing list is available to find out when the product will go on sale.