The Wonderful World of Mechanical Music

31 May, 2018 to 28 October, 2018

A journey through the sounds of Fado in the world of mechanical music instruments, from the collection of Luís Cangueiro (Mechanical Music Museum).

In the middle of the 19th century, the mechanical music industry flourished in Europe, through mechanisms that allowed the automatic production of sound, with or without human intervention. Built between the last quarter of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century, automatic music devices such as music boxes, automatons, barrel organ, musical pictures, pianolas - and, later, phonographs and gramophones - challenged the conventional understanding of musical practices, simulating, in an automatic mechanism, the human creation of organized sounds.

Curator: Sara Pereira and Luís Cangueiro