If von Tristen's early career can be justified in part by the demented demands of his employers, there is little to explain his later career. Perhaps haunted by the ghostly cries of the men and women victimized by his elaborate torture machines, von Tristen became obsessed with death itself and the worlds beyond. He spent the last decade of his life working on the ultimate machine... a device which would allow him to temporarily leave his body in order to glimpse the world beyond. Von Tristen called the device his "ghost machine."
The Ghost Machine, also known as the Box of Shadows, was said to look like an ordinary coffin, but harbored an inner mechanism resembling a complicated music box. Most of von Tristen's notes regarding the specific functioning of the Ghost Machine have been lost. What has survived shows that von Tristen sought to combine many elements of the emerging science of the early Renaissance with beliefs that might have been better left in the gloomiest days of the Dark Ages a century before. Combining a knowlege of machines with alchemical principals and elements of the occult (there are several references to demons in his later journals), the Ghost Machine appears to have been a hybrid of both science and supstitition.
Did it work? Unfortunately, we have no proof that von Tristen even finished his creation. Von Tristen was eventually accused of witchcraft by the same religious and feudal lords he had served as master craftsman, and found guility of heresy and witchcraft. He was burned at the stake in 1485, along with most of his notes and journals. The existence of the ghost machine has never been verfied, although in recent years interest in the idea of such a machine has grown, to the extent that Hollywood has even started to develop a movie based on von Tristen's mysterious Box of Shadows.
The tritone is a restless interval, classed as a dissonance in Western music from the early Middle Ages through to the end of the common practice period. This interval was frequently avoided in medieval ecclesiastical singing because of its dissonant quality. Some of the earliest examples of the tritone being deliberately applied in a musical way are found in the music boxes of Wolfgang von Tristen. The term, diabolus in musica ("the Devil in music"), was used by the medieval church to describe the disturbing sound produced by von Tristen's creations.
Because of its symbolic association with the devil and its avoidance, this interval came to be heard in Western cultural convention as suggesting an "evil" connotative meaning in music. Today the interval continues to suggest an "oppressive", "scary", or "evil" sound, but in the Middle Ages the tritone was considered much more than merely symbolic... it was considered dangerous. Musicians and singers were discouraged by the church from using the tritone, and in extreme examples, might face excommunication or other punishment. Von Tristen himself denied any malfeasance in his use of the "Devil's Tritone," claiming that human expression, just as human experience, should not be restricted in its reach, and that only by exploring the darker realms of knowledge does humanity have a chance of confronting the true face of the universe.
Von Tristen's claims of innocence were certainly not helped by the actual application of his music boxes. A notorious inventor of elaborate torture devices, von Tristen often embedded music boxes within the structures of his creations. Whether the music boxes provided a kind of disgusting counterpoint to the screams of the victims of his machines, or were simply a form of sinister artistic decoration to something he took manaical pride in, is not entirely clear. What is obvious is that Von Tristen's rumored association with the Devil was taken seriously by the feudal lords of his day until he was finally burned at the stake after being convicted of witchcraft.
