Comment by beAbU | Hacker News Reader

Comment by beAbU | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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