Wintergatan Marble Machine (2016) [video] | Hacker News Reader

Wintergatan Marble Machine (2016) [video]

youtube.com

375 pointskaycebasques131 comments

According to the artist himself, this video is a bit misleading as the majority of what you hear in this video is not from the machine. There were some fundamental flaws in the first designs, he almost gave up on the whole project, but he's recently come back with plans for a whole new version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbmMnu-NpaI

He's very open about the whole process, it's quite interesting from an engineering perspective.

Designing the marble divider: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y83I8mLKufo

Testing the new fly wheel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ouH21npL58

He's on his third iteration of the machine because he keeps over engineering parts and starting over, in a way which is simultaneously impressive and heartbreaking.

Pain is temporary. Glory is forever.

*bittersweet angle grinder noises*

I love his mad scientist project (I liked the characterization from some comments below "slow descent to madness") and I'm glad he got enough funding from patrons

Is it practical? No, but he had real progress (he's not just walking in circles) and he has acquired real engineering chops in meantime

Also there are other marble engineers in Youtube and he checks out their progress as well, see this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLD_Nl12oacv he left a comment. I think this kind of cross-polination is important

So I think he will eventually ship something (and this something might mean a music video on Youtube but I hope it also mean a live concert)

edit: if I had to criticize him, it would be only about his worship of the likes of Elon Musk. But, it's pretty tame/harmless (if a bit cringe) and if it inspires him to do better engineering, all the better

There is that one shot where his marble divider tips over and 100 marbles fall out. You can see the tears welling up in his eyes... my guess is that he was at the brink of depression if not full on depressive at that point.

He addresses that in a later video, but that shot really hit too close too home for me.

Do you have a link? I've been watching the channel on and off but never seen that. Sounds heartbreaking.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YqWApMqD4h4

1:40

[heartbreaking] It really is ... just watched it again after child poster posted the link to the (newer) video containing the clip.

Watching him has been watching the second system effect in real time.

I follow him and coincidentally (or not, maybe there's some correlation with this coming back to HN?) he posted a video last week with sort of an epiphany.

According to him, he realized he's been trying to engineer a functionally perfect machine this whole time, and that's pointless, because it's never been about the machine function, but about the artistic expression of creating such machine.

From this, he derived that instead of optimizing the machine for function, he'll begin optimizing for fun, looks and generally the "cool" of the machine. I'm excited to see what's going to happen from now on.

> he posted a video last week with sort of an epiphany

He does this every year or so. He always has some big takeaway – engineering for fun, getting back to enjoying his work, getting anything finished so he can go on tour which he enjoys...

I followed the channel for a few years because I wanted to see a machine come together, but I realised over time that the machine is not the point. It's a self-help channel, it's about productivity, burnout, and the process of engineering and design.

If that's what you want, great. But I get enough pontificating about engineering process in my job, and I was there for the machine, so I gave up. If he ever goes on tour I'll be there, but I'm not holding my breath.

The best time period was when the entire YouTube maker community was building parts for it and making their own videos for the process - felt like something really special.

Yeah this was good, which then made it even more sad when each part got cast aside as having been the wrong solution in some way. I'm sad to think of all the effort that went into the project from others. It seemed like a team came in to support him at one point, but then he dropped off YouTube in favour of live streaming (at inappropriate times for many), only to return later, without the team.

That was when ToT made some part, right?

I've lost count of the number of "epiphanies" he's had.

Funny that he’s only realising this now when he’s had comments telling him for years pretty much exactly this.

I'm happy to hear he is finally realizing the error of his previous decision, but this should not be an epiphany. So many of us that followed the project told him exactly that when he decided to throw out the MMX and start over. I still worry that he hasn't learned the lesson that "perfection is the enemy of good" and will use yet another change of direction/method to avoid actually finishing something.

I remember him saying something similar like a year ago or more.

I like his pursuits. I would personally rather he make more music though

It got a bit strange when he suddenly got into web 3.0. Not sure what happened to that but I don't hear much about it anymore fortunately.

That's most people's web 3.0 experience lol.

I literally can not watch another video about the gate mechanism. I'll still watch one of his videos here or there, but the instant any gate discussion comes up I have to close it.

This is why I can't watch him anymore. He has really painted himself into a corner and allowed this to become an obsession. He would have been happier if he had just given it the three months he initially thought the MMX project would take, and when that got out of hand cut his losses and dumped the project. He's a good composer and musician. He has hardly made any music for years and his band members are probably not going to wait around.

Sure, he might actually get there in the end, but at what cost? Both monetary and in terms of mental health.

Yeah, it has been fascinating, I've learned a lot from watching him, and I really want him to succeed, but this is painful to watch.

Is there something inherently more meaningful about composing music? It's all futile and pointless, so if the dude likes making little Dr Suess machines and then destroying them to make new ones, who's to say it's not worthwhile? He's just raking patterns in his own personal sand garden.

From a mental health perspective, I'm worried. Martin used to compose, record with his band and perform live. And Wintergatan are great live.

Spending 5 years failing to build MMX and then starting over to spend...what, another 2,3,5 years building a machine that at this point isn't terribly interesting anymore seems more like painful sisyphean obsession than fun. And if he were to succeed this time, he will still have pissed away a decade he could have spent doing something he is actually good at.

Sure, it was entertaining to watch and I learned quite a few interesting things along the way. But towards the end, it became painful and disturbing to watch as the project seemed to consume him.

I'm not going to argue that one activity is more meaningful than another, but wasting a decade doing something you're clearly not good at and failing doesn't seem like a good place to be.

IMO over-engineering is the actual goal here.

The goal is not to make music, or even to have a musical instrument. The goal is to have a music machine that is visually impressive *because* of its complexity.

Some people already mentioned he could use computers for this. Well, sure! He could even use off-the-shelf mechanical triggers if he wanted to keep it using 100% acoustic instruments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvQ0UXOyh7A

But even if he wanted to stay in the mechanical realm and have reliability for touring, he could just build something centered on music boxes or piano players, which people have been doing for hundreds of years. Bjork toured with music boxes in the past! Those things could just trigger the vibraphone, bass and drums directly via hammers, instead of needing marbles to do the job... Heck, even if he still wants marbles, he could just have a music machine trigger marbles, and buy LOTS of marbles at the top just to avoid that "marble recycling" mechanism.

But a traditional music box is established technology, so it wouldn't be as impressive. And the marbles need to go up and down for drama, if you just have a giant bucket full of them, it's not that impressive anymore... the marbles must be integrated into the "memory" mechanism, etc etc...

So his goal is to have something that is impossibly complicated like a Rube Goldberg Machine. It has to be large and impressive, and each part has to be bespoke and interesting by itself.

Sure it's not the best engineering, but this is what made the first video viral after all :/

I think of it as an art project rather than an engineering project. His medium is CAD software and CNC, and the purpose of the machine is to make more art. There should be more engineering-heavy art in the world like this.

The first one definitely. The viral video was multiple passes, heavily edited.

The second and third ones actually had engineering concerns regarding reliability, as he wanted it to be safely transportable for tours.

How does he convert a variable speed hand motion to a constant speed rolling? Some spring mechanism?

A problem solved by old music machines. Here's his recent video on it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i63t7ekNFoY

TLDR: speed governor

Cool! Another question: how are those actual song drums/cylinders made? i.e. how are songs programmed? Especially interested in those old machine drums.

You mean in the old music boxes?

It was done by hand. The first ones used wood and nails. This one here was supposedly made by school kids: https://youtu.be/i63t7ekNFoY?feature=shared&t=547

Later there are metal cylinders which little teeth that are placed in holes that are drilled by hand. Here's a CNC doing the work, can't find a video of someone doing it, though: https://youtu.be/RXf924CGLbs?feature=shared&t=147

And also of course player pianos and punched-card music boxes, which are a different thing and much cheaper to mass produce: https://youtu.be/XGo0seI6sYs?feature=shared&t=167

There were also some "hammered" cylinders in-between, which are a bit closer to player pianos, and much faster to produce, since one could just use some template: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeApD2-y4i4

The last one shows the foundation for those cheap music boxes you can get as souvenirs. They are often just a pressed sheet of metal rolled into a cylinder. In this video here you can see the "seam": https://youtu.be/IYpnzSJGE-c?feature=shared&t=12

I'm sure there were other techniques along the way too.

I mean, school kids might have been used for menial work, but how was a composed music transformed into such rolls? Timing, aligning multiple pitches and instruments, etc...

I'm gonna give a general answer since I don't know your level of music knowledge.

The cylinder has a certain speed and length, so music must be written in a certain way that it fits there in a pleasant way if looped. This means ending in a fermata, sort of fading (and not truly looping) or having the number of bars be somewhat musical (often powers of 2).

From knowing the tempo of the song and the speed of the cylinder you know how many notes of a certain length you can fill in one rotation: 8 full notes, 16 half notes, 32 quarter notes, and so on. [1] Just divide the circumference by the numbers and you get the physical length of each note. Keep in mind that if you're not truly looping and is ending the song with each revolution, you can be very fast and loose here.

So the written music itself, plus the physical lengths of notes, will inform you on where you should place each note.

For multiple pitches: pitches are just in a different axis. One axis is timing, the other is pitch. This is visible when you look at the "comb" of music boxes, they have pitches arranged from low to high, side by side, like harp strings or piano keys.

About syncing: it is all written in sheet music, so you just follow it. Two notes that must be played together are just on the same axis. For a more tight timing just align it... It won't be perfect if you're a kid doing it by hand, which is why music boxes traditionally often use arpeggios in detriment of more blocky chords.

Multiple instruments: if a music box can play different timbres, it's triggered by having duplication, meaning two or more sound producers (combs, hammers + strings, etc). So you have, for example, 20 notes available for one instrument and 10 for another. But it is all on the same cylinder, so it is in sync. There will be repeating pitches here and there, but it depends on how the music itself was written.

The first pass of converting sheet music to “holes” must be done by someone able to read sheet music at an amateur level, and do the basic calculations (but of course some people with more experience and musical knowledge will do it better). Then they make a pattern that is reused by whoever is manually assembling.

Tolerances are larger than non-musicians expect. There is a charm to the sound of a music box, and part of that is due to minor timing issues. And that’s true for any music not performed by a computer, really. Humans are not perfect anyway, and a lot of techniques and styles rely on this (from drum flams to Dilla beats)

Not to mention that music boxes are mechanical, so it won't be perfect during playback anyway.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Note_value

My understanding was more that the machine was not reliable and he basically had to piece the piece together / so each shot was the perfect run of potentially a number of attempts

He mentioned two main problems, the marbles would get jammed and the timing was off so the beat wasn't very tight. Both of those things should be fixed, or at least greatly improved, in the next version.

This has been his "problem" for almost a decade. He's trying to build something that's midi-tight. As a musician, somehow he forgets that real musicians also lost the beat now and then, and it makes the music more interesting.

The number of times he's postulated that some design would fix these problems is too damn high.

Professional musicians don't really "lose" the beat. A pro drummer stays on beat, while making small, predictable variations to the timing and the sound that make the music more interesting. That's not the original marble machine though, which played like a sloppy beginner.

I'm pretty sure he understand how all this works because I've heard him explain it before. If at some point he thought he could achieve precise timing down to the millisecond, I must have missed those videos, cause he seems to understand now that's not realistic.

This video was incredible when it came out. The song itself, and the intersection between art and engineering was mind blowing for me back then. The creator released some videos later about making that machine that was also great.

Then he started building the second version of the machine. It was supposed to fix all the "issues" he had with the first, and be something that can tour the world with. Super exciting!

About 90% done, he abandoned the project to start with a /third/ version for reasons I _still_ don't understand. I think he allowed "perfect" to be the enemy of "done" and he frequently went down rabbit holes of design and "innovation" that left me frustrated because it was clear to me his original concept was "good enough"

Sadly I stopped watching around this time. I'm sure his content is still interesting, and he definitely innovates in the marble machine space. But he stopped making music, and now only focuses on 3D printed marble gate designsto my eyes.

So he said that he misrepresented how good the MMX was in order to make good content. Apparently, it was still too unreliable to actually be usable.

So for the MM3, he decided to do more engineering and less good content. His videos are less interesting since, and contain less music.

At one time the problem was that he wanted to tour with the machine, so it had to withstand transportation.

But in some recent videos he mentions how the form factor and the goal of "looking cool" was more important than reliability.

IMO the problem he is not really picking a consistent direction. Either make it road-worthy or make it look like a steampunk Rube Goldberg contraption. Or better: make two machines. But making a single machine that is both reliable and Rube-Goldberg-esque is be 10x more difficult than making two machines.

There's always the third option: first make a simple machine that works but looks crap, and then gradually upgrade the aesthetics of the worst looking part until it's "cool enough".

Or, in Software development terms:

Make it work, make it right, make it [cool]

I explained it elsewhere, but the "looking cool" part is not just about aesthetics in the superficial sense. It's about the fact he wants to use marbles to trigger electro-acoustic instruments, and he wants to have some features that kinda suck, such as the "marble elevator".

He could keep the mechanical sequencer and trigger instruments using hammers. That would make this project more feasible. But then he wouldn't have the marbles...

Honestly all the problems here are centred around the "marbles" constraint :/

But your point stands: he could lower the scope and actually finish something.

Well, it has to be reliant enough to be able to take on tour, but cool enough to be worthy of taking on tour.

That’s a hard balance.

You can look at some of the videos from the music machine museum that now has the second marble machine and has been working on making it actually work. Basically it was 90% done but missing the other 90%. It was far too unreliable to get through one song still let alone a whole show:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yr6NCtYQ9lQ

I was at the meetup and they let us play it ourselves. It was great, but you could see all the issues it still had even after them spending months with a team of multiple people.

He didn’t abandon it to start on a new project. He abandoned it because it was too loud and too unstable to go on tour.

_after_ he abandoned it, he decided to try again “from first principles”. He gave the machine to a museum in Germany, where a bunch of volunteers spend months getting it to play a simple song and they all agreed it was a nightmare to work with.

If you enjoy Wintergatan’s clever marble videos, check out Ivan Miranda’s marble clock project: https://youtu.be/JLD_Nl12oac. Ivan relies on 3d printing vs. Martin’s emphasis on machining and welding, but they are both charming and instructive creators.

Also, marble video aficionados might also enjoy this >> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lso6OSfKrrk

Though these two guys could not be more different from each other. Ivan actually has a toy marble machine video which he seemingly build over the course of a few weeks. I feel like he could design and build from scratch a fully featured MMX in not much more than that.

It would be cool with a “space race” for marble machines (:

I love love love love love his other instrument, the modulin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFfe4ZRQOH8 (just the original music it played)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUdWeBYe3GY (explains how it works)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaW5K85UDR0 (playing music from mega man)

Selected comment from the last video

> I love how it's an instrument with the aesthetic style of "functionally a mess"

Everyone is chatting about the engineering aspects of this project which is to be expected, but putting aside that for a second since it’s been discussed to hell:

I really enjoy Molin’s music, when he does release some. He is well known for the marble machine but before that he had a band called Detektivbyrån - minimalist electronica that got famous performing on the streets of Göteborg. IMO his work around that is just as interesting as the marble machine - it really brought a breath of fresh innovation to street performing when Detektivbyrån’s album’s were released nearly two decades ago.

I have both Wintergatan and Detektivbyrån in my "calm/reading" playlist, and it's such a joy whenever the random shuffle decides to play it. So yeah I wish there was more! :-)

He is currently working on the 3rd evolution of the marble machine and posts build updates on this YouTube channel. Interesting intersection of music and machining content.

What happened to his 2nd evolution of it, that one was being built for a long time too?

It is up and running in a music museum in Germany.

I haven’t followed it too closely, but he posted a video saying that previous iterations of the machine didn’t make good music. They were really loud (mechanical noise drowned out musical noise) and didn’t play music in time. In fact, the video from the submission has had its audio significantly edited to sound pleasing. I believe he posted the raw audio a few months ago in a video. His current design looks much more promising.

I think it was also throughput and reliability issues. He gave up on it in connection with a marble tube bursting.

The guys that actually finished it also agreed that it would not have been possible to tour with this iteration of the machine.

It's a bit of a touchy subject. It's clear that he's a brilliant musician and self-motivated to the brink of mania, but he struggles with perfectionism and his insistence on reinventing the entire field of mechanical engineering from scratch precludes him ever actually finishing the project to his own impossible standards. If he didn't have a huge community of experienced, fascinated, and often frustrated engineers and manufacturers pointing out his most egregious missteps, he'd be sunk. The past near-decade has involved being sucked into fractal rabbit holes due to unknown-unknowns while obsessing over imperceptible details. The second machine was thrown out entirely and he started from scratch in an attempt to fix what he saw as fundamental flaws with it, and while his process with the third machine seemed promising at first, at this point it doesn't seem like he's really any closer to success.

His videos are often entertaining (he's very charismatic and enthusiastic), and you'll learn a decent amount about engineering. But the most important thing that you'll learn are the unstated lessons: the necessity of compromise and the importance of setting measurable and realistic goals if you ever hope to actually achieve a given result. Though if nothing else, I applaud him for being so open with his efforts, especially when things don't pan out like he was expecting.

I think in the last video or 2 he finally had the revelation he needs to have a chance at success; he's found that the engineering must support the design, not control it. We'll see if it holds up.

He has had this realization several times over the years. Good luck to him, but at this rate I don't believe he'll ever manage to finish it, and if he ever does he still won't be happy with it.

Yeah, I'm not confident it'll hold. I figure someone will eventually make a marble music machine that's robust enough to tour, but I have doubts it'll be him.

I enjoyed watching his videos for a few years, but I eventually had to stop because it was so hard to watch what you describe. You put it very kindly; I would have called it a channel documenting a slow descent into madness. Maybe it was my own latent perfectionism that made me so uncomfortable watching him obsess, repeatedly restart, second-guess, overanalyze, self deprecate, etc. It’s a hard thing to relive vicariously.

Exactly how I feel about it. When he made his video about engineering principles from Elon Musk (who I admire as an engineer), my heart just sank. I recognised that he'd begun setting standards for himself that are necessary for mission critical projects like space flight and driving, but lost touch with why we are interested in his Marble Machine - which is fun.

He was always clear on his expectations. He wants to make a machine he can take on a world tour. That's his stated goal.

The consequence of that is that it has to be reliable enough to play through a full concert without maintenance or breakdown, and it has to be robust enough that it can be transported from place to place. These are his hard requirements.

Then there are some less well defined requirements. Which is that the machine has to play nice music and has to be a marble machine as Martin understands it.

This last is the real constraint. Otherwise he could just buy a midi keyboard which would fulfil all the requirements about reliability, robustness and quality of music, but would fail the spirit of the endeavour.

All the things you describe, are all reasonable constraints and goals. However, the issue is in chasing sub millisecond standard deviations. Which is amusingly the point at which you might as well buy a midi keyboard.

Where does "tight music" come into those constraints.

I count that under the first of the two fuzzy constraints I wrote about: “the machine has to play nice music”

I agree that there Martin seems to be aiming for a very high degree of repeatability in timing, but it also seems that he has designs which meet those expectations of his and this was not the reason why he abandoned the second attempt. (Ad far as i can tell based on the videos.)

I have to admit, I find this a bit ironic.

Many of the digital sequencing and notation products I've worked with went out of their way (arguably) to play "less-tight music" through various "humanizing" features.

Yes, we want music that is sufficiently accurate and "tight"... but within the confines of human capability. The slight errors of both time and intonation in some cases give music a much more human feel. Now to be fair, I don't want to suggest that this sort of human inaccuracy is mere randomness either: it's typically not just random error... there's usually a bias and it definitely within limits (unless you're a bad musician of course :-) ).

Same experience.

Super-tight MIDI music sticks out like a sore thumb when you mix it with things performed by humans.

I remember watching his videos on this topic and never being able to hear any difference between the supposed "good" and "bad" examples.

He actually partnered with an agency and released a virtual marble machine as an app and VST

I think it was more like a music box

He actually just posted a video in which he admits he lost the plot, and forgot that the real goal is something that is fun. I hope he finds his way back to that!

https://youtu.be/BpJYqC4PWEw

I'm not personally an Elon Musk fan, but the video with a clip of him is actually pretty good IMO:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WN90HYiFpAw

Some people will say it's common-sense stuff but it is stuff I see everyday writing software and it's so hard to change. It's refreshing to see a spaceship company having the same issues haha.

One might say he lost his marbles.

I shouldn’t upvote this, but I’ll do so anyway.

Upvoted for the pun, with the sad caveat that also it feels like a human tragedy unfolding. :-/

I try to remember that I've learned my engineering lessons in small doses, over many years, and often in an environment where I wasn't the most senior engineer, without the full scope of the design under my control. As I've grown as an engineer, more of those things have come into my purview, and I still have many more lessons to learn. Martin is speed-running the game, in public, and deserves a lot of leeway.

> Martin is speed-running the game, in public, and deserves a lot of leeway.

This is how I felt at first, and I appreciated (and still appreciate) the frankness of his verve for experimentation. But by this point I wouldn't use the word "speedrunning" to describe his progress; he appears to have found the practical limits of autodidactism. If his only goal in life was to produce the machine (which, to be clear, it isn't), then it would have been much faster to go to school for a few years and get a degree in engineering, while apprenticing as a machinist on the side. His publicly-broadcast education, while entertaining, is anything but efficient.

The people who go to engineering school for a few years generally get engineering jobs, rather than making crazy art projects. There's plenty of room in the world to also fit some autodidacts following their dreams in apparently inefficient ways.

You are 100% on the mark.

I really loved his series building the second one, but when he decided that it was fundamentally flawed and he needed to rebuild from scratch, I stopped watching in frustration.

He's really talented, but I'm just... sad for him.

It's not just perfectionism, he struggles to get the machine functional at all. Afaik the original video (this post) is cut together from different runs and generally hides a lot of the scrappy issues with the first machine. He wants to get the new one actually working well enough to play consistently, and to be moved around.

You know, I always remembered the Wintergatan Marble Machine and occasionally idly wondered why I never again saw anything new from someone who must surely be incredibly talented. This explains that.

Here's something of his that's entirely unrelated to marbles, it's a handheld modular synthesizer of his own design with an analogue fretboard that he calls a "modulin": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaW5K85UDR0

Reminds me of an Otamatone!

I won't say anything about the viability of the design #2 vs #3, but from purely entertainment point of view, it was fun and relaxing to watch his regular tinkering videos while he was working on the second machine, but once he stopped, his channel became an emotional rollercoaster. It's just too emotionally draining to watch the later videos involving machine #3, so I stopped.

Reminds me of my first coding job - I obsessed over writing the best code and as a result I never delivered anything on time and it was full of bugs because I never finished anything and refactored and restarted.

A kind old hand took me aside and taught me about KISS (Keep it Simple) and it must be good enough.

The “reinventing” issue is so huge in all fields. I’ve watched many smart people try to reinvent or discover things that are well known and tested because they’re not “perfect”.

You really need to be able to evaluate if something is worth your time and it’s often best to just try what exists and only iterate if needed. Especially when you actually need to deliver a product

The second machine turned out to be unfit for one of the main goals: live performances.

Following Martin's journey has been a privilege. His honest insights on the struggle of trying to balance hard design requirements with keeping that which made the original project fun and playful have been insightful and fascinating.

The second one is being completed (as far as I understand) by a team in germany at a music machine museum (Musikkabinett). Their channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Musikkabinett

His MMX video blog is the textbook go-to example for letting perfect be the enemy of good.

was there any other music done except for this track?

Don't know about the original, but there are some music on the channel with unfinished versions of the v2 machine.

Robotic fun instrument I worked on this back in the day. flying balls and wine glasses and drums. I did the lighting and later redid the real-time low latency streaming:

https://bea.st/absolut-quartet

Awesome!!

I was so hooked to his videos a couple years ago... he was making real progress to what was his 2nd iteration of the marble machine, then he suddenly decided he had to start from scratch and got into some crypto/web3.0 thing.

That was the last video I watched.

I have watched many of his videos, including recent ones and I don't remember anything about crypto/web3.0. He kind of an Elon Musk fan, but far from the most obnoxious one.

The "start from scratch" part is annoying to many, including myself, but he explained his reasons. And a group took back the 2nd iteration (MMX), trying to fix it, and mostly agreed. The goal was to have a machine playable on stage, and there was too many problems with that.

> I don't remember anything about crypto/web3.0

He had a phase for a while where he tried to run the project as a DAO. Didn't make any sense to me, but that's web3 for you.

It's been rather sad watching him fail and fail again, often due to a misplaced sense of perfectionism. I can't really stand to watch his videos anymore, as they're like watching a mad artist defeat themselves

For similar, yet grounded and successful projects in this vein, I've been watching Ivan Miranda's videos. He recently built a massive marble clock, and it's really fun watching him realize when it's good enough, and declare it finished

This is cool but have you seen barcode scanner music? https://youtu.be/2CvnajExX-A

Actually I did stumble across it on my "weird music instruments" rabbithole last night! They also figured out how to somehow play TVs and a space heater as guitars?? https://youtu.be/A0VYsiMtrNE?si=8SUpClphR2f1hBFf

ei wada is immensely talented, see also his open reel ensemble[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-6WfT8RAh4

The sound of that piece reminds me a lot of Emerson, Lake and Palmer's rendition of 'Fanfare for the Common Man'[1]. Progressive as Progressive Rock is though, I'm not sure ELP would have been let into the Toronto Olympics stadium with an assortment of electric fans and televisions!

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2zurZig4L8

That'll be Lindt's most cost-effective product placement yet!

The marble machine song and video of the Rubik's cube contraption was whimsical and so good but he released no music since the 2013 album and that song in 2016.

He is seemingly obsessed with building something for a couple of years right now - would prefer he just stick to using synthesizers and make music.

It is reminds me a chap I met at uni - he sat in the Applied Maths computer lab every time when I was there and one day I asked him what he was doing as he was not goofing around like the first years playing games or destroying dot matrix printer ribbons making greeting cards but writing some serious code in TrueBasic.

He was writing his own programming language called "Tree" and he even showed me a programming manual he had written for it - it had a Tree on the cover - serious mad scientist vibes.

he's had a handful of singles out in 2018 and 2019. He's also released a VST too I think, although I didn't get it.

His passion is his passion. He's a talented and inquisitive and seriously interested in this project. If he can afford to devote his life to his passion and not be broke he's winning life, in my eyes.

Nothing on Spotify though - it could be licensing issue from my country.

I have been hoping for long that he would finalize this machine of his and start working on a new album.

Please get me right, the machine is marvellous but I love their music even more.

The music is beautiful and the machine looks like a true labor of love. Looking up the machine, it looks like they sell apps that mimic the machine sounds and sound packs worth hundreds of dollars per license, so the video is a great viral sales tactic for their real products. The closest thing to the sound of the machine I found is a Kalimba instrument. The more notes the better. I was able to replicate the song from the machine on a kalimba at home.

I watch it every once in a while. He's done a lot more, but somehow this one is still the one that really excites me.

If you like Wintergarten, and you like LineRider, there is a video for you. It's amazing.

https://youtu.be/c4IIn6ZscPo?si=GOx61Umn-mDUQZ2-

I think music machines like this would be a perfect application of digital computers.

Could you please explain?

The whole machine is just an overgrown midi player in a sense, but also that's not the point.

It’s a lot cheaper to set up something like this in a virtual space - it also takes up a lot less space.

VCV Rack 2 is a free way to very closely replicate the experience of building eurorack module synthesizers - without the cost of buying all the rack gear, and without needing to devote space IRL to assembling and organizing all the parts.

I could imagine a similar approach for designing and operating musical marble machines like this (in fact I’d almost be surprised if something doesn’t already exist, akin to roller coaster tycoon’s coaster design tools!)

Perhaps one could even apply AI and put it on the blockchain!

the programable part of the machine, the tracks themselves are comparable to a midi file

I think part of the point of this project is to avoid electronics and digital tech in the final machine. personally I think it's what makes it so interesting, he's interested in the mechanical design and engineering aspects, not the digital ones

Have you watched the Animusic series ( https://www.youtube.com/@animusic ) ... especially Pipe Dream - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyCIpKAIFyo

Be sure to watch the "Creating the Animusic DVDs" pair of videos.

https://animusic.fandom.com/wiki/Pipe_Dream

Martin has said that those videos were his inspiration for the first marble machine. Those, and Matthias Wandel's gear template generator!

In fact, his comment is at the top of the list on the Pipe Dream video.

One of the early Radeons were advertised with a real-time demo that plays Pipe Dream: https://youtu.be/uG1XkEnYyUc

To those lamenting Martin's "descent into madness," I'm not sure I'd agree. In fact, I assumed, starting a couple of years ago, that he's drawing out the process deliberately as a steady source of income. As long as people remain fascinated, then, well, why not? We still watch a video of his from time to time, but I'm not expecting a finished machine and world tour soon, or ever.

also, a marble clock: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IF4esSNA3k

Hey, it's the DarkHorse Podcast music! I forgot that was Wintergatan, cool!

I started following this guy making the MMX (second verison of this machine) around the same time I was designing and prototyping the most complicated project I've ever worked on.

Tuning in every week and seeing him make progress, or run into a failure and then eventually overcome it kept me motivated with my own personal project. In fact I was even racing him, trying to finish mine before the MMX was completed. The internet is full of b.s. influencers telling you to be motivated, but Martin and the Marble Machine definitely kept me going and kept it fun.

How much is hacker news discussion topic focus second order steered by recommendations algorithms? I just had this one recommended and now it’s here, seems to happen a lot lately!

It goes both ways all the time, things from the Greater Internet Hive Mind get posted on HN or HN posts get regurgitated by the Greater Internet Hive Mind. Occasionally, the cud goes back and forth multiple times (as cuds do), for instance there've been cases of HN->social media->media coverage->HN posts about the media coverage. The order and the participants can also vary, of course.

I had this in my Facebook memories, it is the anniversary of when the original video started to make its rounds.

This particular machine has been on HN a few times before (and with good reason!)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com