This report of an early automaton (although perhaps not musical in the
sense we understand it here) came from Bruce Sterling's Dead Media mail
list.  The Dead Media project attempts to chronicle the history and use
of any communications medium which is obsolete (although not
necessarily in disuse) and includes most of the media we consider near
and dear.  For more information on the Dead Media project, check the
web site:

    http://www.islandnet.com/~ianc/dm/dm.html

Here's the Tipu Tiger write-up:

Source:  David Toop, OCEAN OF SOUND: AETHER TALK, AMBIENT SOUND AND
IMAGINARY WORLDS (London: Serpent's Tail, 1995):  pages 72-73.

"Of all the noise instruments in history, one of the least equivocal in
its intent is Tipu's Tiger.  Captured in India by the British army
after the defeat and death by bullet and bayonet of Tipu Sultan in
1799, this large and amazing object is now housed in the Victoria and
Albert Museum, London.

      "The most succinct and evocative description was written by an
employee of the East India Company:

    "'This piece of Mechanism represents a Royal Tyger in the act of
devouring a prostrate European.  There are some barrels in imitation of
an Organ, within the body of the Tyger, and a row of Keys of natural
Notes.  The sounds produced by the Organ are intended to resemble the
Cries of a person in distress intermixed with the roar of a Tyger. The
machinery is so contrived that while the Organ is playing, the hand of
the European is often lifted up, to express his helpless and deplorable
condition.'

     "John Keats saw Tipu's Tiger in the East India Company's offices
and later referred to it in a satire he wrote on the Prince Regent:
'that little buzzing noise, Whate'er your palmistry may make of it,
Comes from a play- thing of the Emperor's choice, From a
Man-Tiger-Organ, prettiest of his toys.'

     "And when the tiger was first exhibited in the newly-opened
Victoria and Albert Museum, the public cranked the handle to make it
roar with such sadistic, joyful frequency that students in the adjacent
library were driven half-mad by the distraction.

     "In a technical analysis of the instrument, Henry Willis
speculated that 'the intended method of use for the keyboard organ was
to run the knuckles up and down the scale to produce the effects of a
screaming man being killed by a tiger.' Because the design and
materials suggest a European rather than an Indian maker, Willis
suggested that the tiger and its victim were constructed by either a
malicious Frenchman or a renegade Englishman.

     "But whoever made this wonderfully macabre sculpture, Tipu
certainly enjoyed it.  He was obsessed with tigers, for one thing; for
another, as a Muslim whose wealth and land had been plundered by the
colonialists, he hated the British.  Reportedly, he used to circumcise
them when he took prisoners.  His walls were decorated with scenes
depicting soldiers being dismembered, crushed by elephants, eaten by
tigers and other fates too obscene for the British major who saw them
to form a verbal description.

     "'Better to die like a soldier than to live a miserable dependent
on the infidels on the list of their pensioned rajas and nabobs,' Tipu
said at his last military conference.  Delicious irony: through the
preservation of imperial spoils, albeit mute and frozen in the act of
mauling within a glass case, the objectification of Tipu's hatred
endures."

(end of quoted material)

As far as I know, the tiger is still in London's V & A museum, although
I suspect visitors are no longer allowed to make it perform.

--¶
Bill Burns¶
Long Island   NY   USA¶
mailto:billb@savvy.com