Rare Vintage Xyloba Mezzo Orchestra Musical Marble Run

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Xyloba Musical Marble Runs is a creative wooden toy which develops fine motor skills, spatial imagination and facilitates a creative … Read more Xyloba Musical Marble Runs is a creative wooden toy which develops fine motor skills, spatial imagination and facilitates a creative approach to music. As the marble rolls down the track it hits each chime in succession. The interlocking system of ramps and sound blocks, which house the chimes, lets children create a large variety of set ups. Xyloba Musical Marble Runs allow children to compose their own tunes by experimenting with the different chimes and the distance - the lengths of the ramps - between the chimes to create a rhythm.

Samuel Langweiler, a concert cellist in a Swiss Orchestra, started working on his idea of a musical marble run in 1969 which would allow a marble to create a melody by striking chimes while running down the tracks. Samuel wanted the marble run to be interactive and the chimes to be interchangeable so children could not only build marble runs but also create different tunes by changing the order of the chimes and the lengths of the tracks in between.

Manufactured by The Weizenkorn Foundation, based in Basel, Switzerland, the Foundation is a social business which supports and employs over 200 young men and women with psychological impairments who are unable to find work. In the sheltered workshops of the Weizenkorn Foundation these young men and women create the different components of the Xyloba Musical Marble Runs as well as many other beautiful and high quality wooden toys. See less