Wintergatan’s Marble Machine is a fantastical alternative to electronic sequencing – part Dr Suess instrument and part Rube Goldberg device.
Marble Machine is built and composed by Martin Molin of Wintergatan. It uses human power and thousands of marbles to play percussion, bass guitar, xylophone and more.
via Prof. [glazzy]
From the look of it, it should be the “ball-bearing” machine.
Pretty amazing!
i have a ball bearing mousetrap
call it a tomcat
Dayum. That’s an incredible amount of work. Here’s one of the “making of” videos (there are several posted): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQ0nj6wrjyA
Actually, the band that this is from is incredible and their other songs and videos deserve a mention on here.
YOU MUST go see the videos on their website. Very very very interesting stuff.
http://www.wintergatan.net/#/music_and_video
Truly ingenious. What impresses me is the amount of passion and hours this guy must have put into building such an incredible device. Amazing!
Amazing, that kind of ingenuity and effort sort of makes the rest of us look lazy.
Coolest video on Synthtopia
I had a HUGE grin on my face all through that. Absolutely delightful.
No MIDI is a deal-breaker, though…
As others have said, absolutely wonderful.
That ending was just perfect!
This is an absolute con. Well done. Hand cranked in perfect time? Who was playing the bass? Where’s the mic?
Erm….he was playing the bass as is evident in the video. They are at least three mics dotted about. The timing isn’t perfect.
Did you not watch it? It shows how the bass is played and several mics. It doesn’t show that the kick and snare are piezo triggers that are processed heavily in Logic (but another video on their channel does).
How gears work is up to you.
They have videos documenting how it works. They use a flywheel design to stabilize the timing if I’m not mistaken. Watch the other videos and you’ll understand each of the components that go into it.
There are mics. But the bass seems to be looped? He takes his fingers off and the bass still plays?
Why didn’t we hear that much metal ball sounding? They seem to hit the xylophone with not much metallic ball sound.
The balls are hitting the bass strings (see beginning of song) and he is tapping the strings to hit the notes. Also, he’s mixing sound from the room and recorded and midi triggered sound. I thought it might be fake until I watched the building videos, this is an ABSOLUTELY INCREDIBLE machine! Hats off to him.
Brave work, It takes a lot of balls to do that.
nuts , you took it
animusic in real life?
for those who don’t know what that is, go to youtube
Epic! It looks like a physical incarnation of Elektroplankton on the Nintendo DS!
it plays one song.
That never stopped Oasis.
Might wait for the module version to come out
I really like what he made and I don’t want to detract from that but the tempo is too perfect for a hand crank machine with no regulator. Looking at the sound track on Logic it only took 3 beats for Logic BPM counter to detect 73.5 bpm and it never varies more than 0.10+/- for the entire track. If you then set your tempo to 73.5 every beat lines up perfectly. I have experience with hand crank and clockwork musical instruments and the variation is usually much greater than that on devices with metal gears and precise mechanical regulators.
The machine may be real but I don’t believe the soundtrack matches what the machine would produce. In the making of videos there’s one clip where you can see him using Logic to shape the mic hits to sound like drums (why does he not just use a drum?) if you look at the timeline on his screen it shows a lot more tempo variation. This says to me that he at least quantized the material.
Again really nice work and I hope this encourages people to go out and make things but overall I’m kind of sad if the creator felt that he needed to force a high precision tempo to cover up what might have been a pleasing and unique to this machine character of a tempo that slightly rises and falls.
Does anyone else want to reproduce my test?
If you watch the machine and or go to the site you will see he is using a geared down ratio with a flywheel. This remove’s any inconsistencies in the hand crank. It is in fact how all precision geared machines are done. Motor (or hand power) drives large flywheel that in turn through gear reduction drives the action. The more turns of flywheel required to turn the action the smoother and more consistent it will be. Simple engineering. If you drive a car, you experience it every day.
farken krraup! this is a waste of time with today tech ppl are doing this bullsh!et