Museum für Musikautomaten - das klingende Museum

The world-famous "sounding collection" from two centuries invites you to a musical-nostalgic tour. Discover the history of music automatons, amazing technical details and many nostalgic melodies - played live!

The Museum of Music Automatons Seewen SO has been delighting a steadily growing fan base for years. It is located about 20 km south of Basel and is one of the popular attractions in northwestern Switzerland.

The "sounding museum" owes its existence to the passionate collecting activities of Dr. h.c. Heinrich Weiss, who for decades lovingly and meticulously assembled a comprehensive collection of Swiss music boxes and record boxes, music automatons, music clocks, figurine automatons, phonographs and gramophones into what is now a world-famous collection. In 1979 he brought this collection into a museum and opened it to the public. And in 1990 he donated his entire collection, the museum building and the associated grounds to the Swiss Confederation. Since then, the Museum of Music Automatons Seewen SO has been a federal museum. In organizational terms, it now belongs to the Federal Office of Culture (FOC).

The Museum of Music Automatons is located in the middle of the scenic Jura landscape in the Schwarzbubenland region of Solothurn at an altitude of about 610 meters above sea level. It is a very special destination for hikes or excursions at any time of the year. The modern, spacious building also includes a restaurant with sun terrace and a museum store. Right next to it are parking spaces for cars and buses and the post bus stop "Seewen SO, Musikautomaten". Everything is wheelchair accessible throughout.

An important part of the visit to the sounding museum is the one-hour guided tour through the permanent exhibition. Various facets of the world of mechanical musical instruments are illuminated, and very different musical automata are explained and demonstrated - live. Let yourself be carried away musically into a vanished world: In the Salon Bleu you will learn how perfect piano music was brought into the upper middle-class salon around 1910 - recorded by the best pianists of the time and stored on music rolls for mechanical instruments. Or you can listen to a luxury music box, as they were produced in Switzerland in large numbers in the late 19th century as an export hit. Listen to waltzes and tangos in the dance hall, played by large orchestras from Germany, Belgium or the Czech Republic, with whose music our grandparents and great-grandparents got to know each other. And in the workshop hall, discover the inner workings of the music automatons, built with infinite patience, precision and great dexterity.

Children, young people and school classes can combine the tour with the popular "Magic Sound Tour". They get to know the ancestors of their i-Pods, playfully discover the variety and history of self-playing musical apparatuses and can gain new experiences with small experiments on resonance, sound and mechanics. The solutions to the 10 questions can be clicked on their own melody hoop and, at the end, the finished melody can be played on a music box. In this way, a centuries-old technique for storing melodies is put to use.

Another showpiece is the mighty, self-playing Welte Philharmonic organ, which was built for the ocean liner Britannic - sister ship of the Titanic. The Britannic organ can play the approximately 1500 Welte music rolls with interpretations from the first decades of the 20th century. There are only about five Welte Philharmonic organs of this type still in operation in total, and the museum's collection of rolls is world-leading. You can discover the exciting history of the Britannic organ during a 20-minute guided tour and experience the organ live.

A detour to the museum store with its diverse assortment of sounding souvenirs, wonderful music boxes, exhibition brochures, reference books, postcards and CDs and to the restaurant with sun terrace round off the sounding museum visit.

The sounding museum is a wonderful destination for young and old in any weather!


Note: This text was translated by machine translation software and not by a human translator. It may contain translation errors.