Well-known examples of reed instruments are the harmonium, the accordion and the mouth organ, all products of the 19th century. They play their music from pinned wooden cylinders, zinc or cardboard discs and perforated paper rolls. As popular as the disc musical box, hundreds of thousands of reed automata were made towards the end of the 19th century, with Leipzig as their main production centre.
Reed automata form the cheapest category of self-playing musical instruments. They have the same advantage as musical boxes: instead of requiring organ pipes over a metre in length, they only use tiny brass reeds of some two centimetres.