Apparently there was a crazy amount of innovation in high end music boxes in the late 1800s, and the results were unspeakably beautiful, a mechanical dream. There was a good long period of time when recording and playback technology was still weak, so the most effective method of creating automated music was to create the equivalent of a punch card to program a machine that hit musical instruments based on the holes in the card.
I knew of the existence of player pianos from that era, but they always sounded bad, like the 1800s equivalent of thumpy club music. Basically there was no volume control in player pianos, so everything came out in a single uniform band of loudness.
In the early 1900s, some enterprising composers realized that, with player pianos, they no longer had to be limited to what could be played with ten fingers, so they started punching holes all over the punch cards, enabling them to create "machine-generated" music with chords and progressions no human could ever play.
This brings me to a completely different part of music culture -- black midi. Basically the goal of black midi is to create compositions that involve hitting very large numbers of notes at the same time in a cacophony that sometimes sounds good. The most famous black midi song is called "Rush E" -- it appears to have become a niche meme. It starts slow and ultimately ends with banging all 88 piano keys at the same time. These compositions are all rendered by a computer, of course.
... except people are still making player pianos, which means someone could actually play Rush E on a real piano. And so they did.