Craig Smith's Amazon discovery [190311 MMDigest] would seem to be the
perfect solution to Mr. Mueller's assignment, except that his customer
wants a real brass music box, with a shiny brass cylinder that goes
around.  And so it is time for some artistic fakery.

Now, mechanical music people would not resort to this sort of thing,
but clock people, long accustomed to working with antique dealers,
are pretty good at it.

Our catalogs contain bogus quartz movements, bogus pendulums (with
or without an extra battery-operated movement to swing it,) and even
ersatz winding arbors, little square winding posts you can glue into
the holes where you'd have wound the clock.

Having established my credentials as a criminal, I would suggest
that Mr. Mueller purchase the gaudiest reproduction brass cylinder
music box available and install one of the Amazon movements inside
it, complete with a punched paper music strip.  He will have to
devise a way to make the cylinder turn without making any noise.

Mark Kinsler - "Paragon of integrity in craftsmanship"