The Siren Board

I found a video of Uwajima's speaker array playing "Tonbe". Although muffled, you can hear the "idle sound" of the music siren when none of the notes are open.

An aerial pic of Kobayashi Department Store's music siren has also been found!

Jake_7367 wrote: ↑

Wed Mar 01, 2023 11:44 am

I found a video of Uwajima's speaker array playing "Tonbe". Although muffled, you can hear the "idle sound" of the music siren when none of the notes are open.

Nice catch. It seems that it runs like any other music siren.
Also, just an FYI, I am MusicSirenRetweets on twitter. I'm actually not sure about the Kobayashi music siren, as I forget when the date was taken, and it seems to be on a flimsy mount for a few thousand pounds of weight.

IHaveAName wrote: ↑

Wed Mar 01, 2023 1:50 pm

I'm actually not sure about the Kobayashi music siren, as I forget when the date was taken, and it seems to be on a flimsy mount for a few thousand pounds of weight.

I looked closer and it seems to be mounted on the bare roof of the building. Maybe that "mount" surrounds the music siren like Marumitsu's unit?
Also where did you find the aerial pic source?

Just found: a youtube video about Kobayashi that briefly details the music siren's song at 4:22, as well as 3 articles that may have the music siren seen from afar in the pictures shown. 1st, 2nd, 3rd

Jake_7367 wrote: ↑

Fri Mar 03, 2023 7:17 am

IHaveAName wrote: ↑

Wed Mar 01, 2023 1:50 pm

I'm actually not sure about the Kobayashi music siren, as I forget when the date was taken, and it seems to be on a flimsy mount for a few thousand pounds of weight.

I looked closer and it seems to be mounted on the bare roof of the building. Maybe that "mount" surrounds the music siren like Marumitsu's unit?
Also where did you find the aerial pic source?

Since Kobayashi is a defunct department store brand, you can search up 小林百貨店 and it should yield you with plenty of old images. If you would like to try looking through google earth's historical imagery, the old Kobayashi building is now owned by Isetan Mitsukoshi.

Also, I may have found an image of the music siren atop Matsuzakaya Shizuoka
https://imgur.com/gallery/1J8erBv

Bump, as of March 29, it seems as though this second gen music siren (I forgot where rip) has been fixed!

(Go to 14:11 in the video to hear it)
https://youtu.be/ez-LJijuHFE

bump

Devin Buynoch has found some new photos apparently.

I tried to find the original source of this image for a while, but with no luck. I suspect it could possibly be from one of the poster's videos that are now deleted or private. Of course, Marumitsu.

I'm not 100% sure where this is, but I suspect it might be Kumamoto Taiyo. Devin claims it's located at Oita City Hall, but this unit looks like its already in place, at an angle, unlike the Oita city hall music siren, which is installed on top of a tower.

I found this: https://www.google.com/maps/uv?pb=!1s0x ... erState=ga

BTW, updates to the main post will be made in the following months!

Very nice find for the only known recording of this siren. That song is home on the range if anyone was wondering.

Uwajima Castle Notes

There is a possibility that the gen 1 siren at Uwajima Castle played Tonbi as it has been previously demonstrated that Tonbi can be played with 10 notes. Uwajima Sansa and Railway Whistle need some tweaking to get them to fit in 10 notes. With a 12 note siren though, this is completely possible. This could also be completely false because no recordings of this siren exist and all my experimentation is using the key of F Major with a range of D5 to A6 and for the 10 note version E5 to G6.

the Wikipedia article gives a different list of songs, The songs are as follows: Shoes Ring 6:00 AM Walking song 12:00 PM, Home Sweet Home 6:00 PM, Hymn 405 10:00 PM. Although it is listed as Uwajima Castle, these are the songs played by the city hall music siren. The songs were apparently changed in 1970 to 6:00 Annie Laurie, 12:00 Shoes Ring, 6:00 Hometown sky, 10:00 Home Sweet Home. Because I don't know when the city hall siren was removed, I cannot say weather the second set of songs is from the castle or the city hall. This selection was replaced with the current schedule in 1991
For now I will assume that the Castle siren played the same selection as the current castle music siren and the wikipedia article put info on the wrong siren.

Notes on the Okayama Gen 1 siren.

In the Japanese Wikipedia article on music sirens, if you scroll to manufacturing, you will find a whole section on the two sirens on the Okayama Prefecture building. It says that the gen 1 siren played ""Morning" at 7:00, "Bodhi Tree" at 12:00, "Ieji" at 17:00 , and 21:00 . It played the traditional Japanese song "Lullaby", " Firefly Light " at midnight at the end of the year, and " Kimigayo " at 7 am on New Year's Day." It goes on to say that the songs from the first generation siren were inherited by the second generation siren. It also doesn't have the same functionality as the siren at Tokiwa Because the Okayama siren is a 12 note siren and Tokiwa's is a 10 note siren.

I think we have our second 24 note siren
at Takeda Pharmaceuticals I noticed an oddity with their siren. If you look on the corner of the building, you can see a now removed Yamaha music siren. The thing that makes me think this is the24 note variant is that the "Cage" or grille with vents to allow the sound to escape is much taller than a normal music siren. It also looks like it was stacked on top of a second music siren similar to Hamamatsu. Here are some close up pictures to compare to. Wikipedia https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%9F ... C%E3%83%B3

Where the images of the Takeda Pharmaceuticals siren came from: https://sites.google.com/view/yamaha-mu ... oku-region

Sorry if you already knew this

slightly big bbump

clarksburg_1000t wrote: ↑

Wed Aug 09, 2023 5:17 pm

Very nice find for the only known recording of this siren. That song is home on the range if anyone was wondering.

What makes you say that?

I think we have our second 24 note siren
Screenshot 2023-08-28 7.40.12 PM.png
Sorry if you already knew this

Thank you for bringing this up, I suppose I forgot to post it. Someone on twitter asked Yamaha for their list of 2nd generation music sirens, and Takeda Pharmaceuticals came up. This is a few months old, fyi. Also, don't be sorry, we appreciate valuable info like this. Thank you for posting on behalf of me, I'm not as active as I used to be if you could tell. I've been much more focused on railroading stuff.

All replies and off-topicness aside, it's been a bit since I've checked everything about music sirens. Not much has happened so far. Here's what has happened:
The Yawatahama music siren's lower Eb note is quilled, and the lower G note's damper seems to be bouncing back open after being closed. You can also hear the custom connector hitting each side of the stator. I'd imagine it's to do with the custom made parts. View here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLO_fCNZHOY

IHaveAName wrote: ↑

Tue Sep 05, 2023 2:17 am

slightly big bbump

clarksburg_1000t wrote: ↑

Wed Aug 09, 2023 5:17 pm

Very nice find for the only known recording of this siren. That song is home on the range if anyone was wondering.

What makes you say that?

If there's more recordings then I don't know about them. If it's about the song then here's a link to a square wave synth I made on the online sequencer. https://onlinesequencer.net/3585588
Yawatahama Notes
Even though the new parts seem to be failing, at least the siren still works. Parts will probably be made soon if someone notices. It's hard for me to hear the bounce. It's at least better than that failure where it missed the open position completely. I believe that the city and the maintenance provider are doing everything in their power to keep this siren operational. The new parts will likely arrive at some point being marked by some downtime from the siren and hopefully we will have the siren running normally again.


Am I the only one who realized that the siren at the Michinoku Bank Odate Branch has been boarded up since it's deactivation

Yamagata City Hall Siren Notes
A recent reddit post appeared saying the siren on this building is gone. Unfortunately when I compared it to another image of the building, I saw that the siren was indeed missing, then I saw pictures showing the building was gone too. The sad part is that this was the siren we all hoped would start running again. I want to know if there is a way to reach out to the city hall and see what became of it (Hopefully it didn't come down with the building). Until then, I guess this siren is gone forever.
IF you want to scroll through the dates, here's the google maps link:https://www.google.com/maps/@35.5904746 ... ?entry=ttu Tokiwa
Found a random tweet from last year saying that Brahms' Lullaby was done at 9:00 PM
Here's the tweet: https://twitter.com/toyu04_LUGERP08/sta ... 4831254529