It’s hard to think of short, slow, lo-rez tunes that are recognizable.

Ode to Joy, maybe?

/edit: what are other limitations are there?

That’s my process to obviating ear worms.

It’s a Small, Small World.

There. I said it.  Sorry.  Now the rest of you can join me in humming it for about the next three days.

Or maybe the ol’ Cantina Band song, as made famous by Figrin D’an and the Modal Nodes.  Slowed down, that’d make a pretty awesome music box stomp.  I wonder if we have the notes?

The timing for the tune is a little off also, I’m wondering if the notes aren’t quite played on a line radially from the centre as I assumed when I set up the model.

I wonder if it may have something to do with the fact that even though the music box element is lined up radially, so that all the notes along a common radial line should initiate their triggering simultaneously, the notes farther out will sound measurably earlier than those closer to the axis since they pass under the music box faster, and I imagine each individual note’s triggering mechanism is identical to the others.  You know what I mean: the trigger needs to move a fixed distance (say, 1mm) before the note fires off, and that 1mm is a smaller percentage of the groove’s circumference, and thus takes less time per revolution to traverse, the farther out you go toward the edge of the record disc.  You might need to build in a degree or two of “timing advance” into the shorter-radius grooves, since (as with internal combustion engine spark timing), the note-triggering event is of a constant duration, is it not, being a spring-driven twang… correct?  I’m sure you could calculate a formula of increasingly early offsets as you approach the innermost groove.

As for songs, I remember that the selection was not that extensive. “Mary Had a Little Lamb” is the only one that comes to mind right now. I can’t remember the others.

As for nominating a song, how about the Legend of Zelda theme, the original one?

As a couple of people have pointed out it’s a music box, the records are the storage media for the tune.  This means that it can be impossible to set up some tunes since the right notes aren’t available, no matter what key you choose. 

It’s nice to see a few more ideas since I already made two or three false starts.

There are (as I discovered) 16 unique notes but 22 notes in total with 6 repeats which I think are to allow some notes to be repeat faster; the mechanism uses a set of toothed wheels that are pulled round by the pegs on the disc and pluck the music box comb – if pegs come around too fast they might miss or jam.

The timing for the tune is a little off also, I’m wondering if the notes aren’t quite played on a line radially from the centre as I assumed when I set up the model.

Calling this a “record player” is inaccurate, it’s a music box with interchangeable tune media.

It sounds like an old music box, so I assume that there are metal pins that get plucked, but — oh wait! The head is straddling the entire record’s radius, isn’t it? So each of the grooves in the record contains the bumps that pluck the pins in the head, yes? And one revolution of the record is the entire song.

Got it (but correct me if I’m wrong).