Music Box with Strips = "Pling-Plong"

Thanks to everyone who offered information on the paper-strip playing
music box I found in Amsterdam, and which I described in 990813 MMD
earlier.  After a bit of detective work in Utrecht (before visiting the
mechanical music museum there) I found two more of these mechanisms for
sale and bought them both without a moment's hesitation -- just the
mechanisms and the hole-punchers, with no wooden cases.

The shop in Utrecht actually sold several other pre-coded "punch-it-
yourself" strips for this device, mainly German songs, and they also
had a few grid-lined "blanks" so I could start experimenting with
making my own music strips.  At this shop I also discovered the
whimsical name by which this system is known in Germany and the
Netherlands: "Pling-Plong".

Oh, the joy of staying up until four in the morning with my three
pling-plongs and my two blank card strips, punching away into the night
until I had produced a short original ragtime piece on one card, and a
lullaby my grandmother used to sing on the other!  Oh, the elegant
madness of picking bits of paper-punch confetti out of my hair and off
of my clothes, as each successive "punch" sent a tiny disc of paper
soaring into parts unknown...  Has any music box ever sounded as sweet
to my ears as this curious pling-plong, dutifully playing my own
compositions and arrangements, coded and card-punched only minutes
before?  I sense a new obsession growing within my mind, and its name
is pling-plong.

At the Mechanical Music Museum in Utrecht, I found that the gift
shop also sold unhoused pling-plong mechanisms, and had stacks of
grid-lined blank cards, four for one guilder.  I bought fifty of them,
and I think I can probably make my own in the future.  The museum even
has an entire room dedicated as a pling-plong workshop, where you can
sit down with blank cards, a puncher, a pling-plong, and some hard
plastic templates, and reproduce pling-plong compositions from the
templates to try out for yourself.

What amazes me is that very few people in this forum had ever heard
of this little gadget -- if the number of responses I received is any
indication -- when, in fact, the system seems to have a strong presence
here in Europe.  Are there any other closet pling-plongers out there in
the MMD or the MBSI?  Is there some kind of pling-plong club, society,
or support-therapy group I can join?

  "Pling plong pling plong pling plong"

Manda
Manda Clair Jost