This sounds very pleasant, and it was clearly a tremendous amount of work. But I have a couple of questions. Can it only play this one musical piece? And if it lacks the versatility of most musical instruments, can you really call it an “instrument”? Would a musician call a music box an instrument?
I’m not belittling the effort put into it, I’m just wondering how it is classified.
It does look at least partially programmable. There’s a belt with pegs in it that controls the xylophone portion of the machine that looks like it could be rearranged. The person playing the instrument appears to also have real-time input into which notes the bass guitar plays.
I’d say it’s an instument. He’s playing it, not just turning a crank.
His website looks interesting but my iPad can’t handle it for more than a couple of seconds.
That is very cool. People have been playing what is basically a music box for ages on end – kalimbas.
It might *look* more like a musicbox (which I’d argue yes, are instruments anyway), but it seems to be more functionally similar to a synthesizer/keyboard; some programmable/automated bits, some manually-tuned/timed bits.
It reminds of an old animation video from the late 90s / early 00s that was a big, sequenced animation that did something very similar. The creator basically animated a big space where things were flalling and moving like this, creating the sound as the process instead of as a track that was overlaid. The name is escaping me right now, unfortunately…
re 1:
yes. I’m with you.
It’s like calling a sequencer, “not an instrument” because it is just playing want was fed into it. The instrument part is deciding which pieces to program into it and what sequence to play them in at what speed, etc.
to narrowly define “musical instrument” to be a device that the performer has to manipulate to make every sound is a little restrictive.
The device presented is a finely crafted machine that produces a wonderful piece of music, so it is an instrument, it is musical, so musical instrument is applicable. it involves intervention by the performer to produce the music so it/s not just a player piano, but a “musical.instrument”
[it is sweet to see this thing in just about every site of interwebz that I visit. it is sweet.]
Future exhibit for House on the Rock?
@6 you are thinking of Animusic (http://www.animusic.com/). And yes, the resemblance is close enough you gotta think there was direct inspiration there. “Hey, could we make something like that really?”
Typical biologist. Where it is in the evolutionary tree is all that matters…
</snark>@9 THANK YOU! It’s been driving me nuts since I watched that.
I’m not sure if it’s a direct inspiration, more of the natural outcome of it. Just a lot of mixing music and Rube Goldberg.
I agree with ah58. At 1:30, you can see it uses removable pegs (I would have gone with Jacquard punchcards myself, so you could change songs more easily — and go back to a previous song without having to set up each individual note every time you wanted to play it), and at 2:41 you can see there are two such belts. I presume one’s for the glockenspiel, and one for percussion and the bass strings, which he still had to fret by hand (so that alone would make it an instrument, in my opinion).
I would also say it’s not it’s own instrument, because it doesn’t really have its own distinct sound. I would say it’s a bunch of instruments all strung together mechanically, kind of like those one-man-band get-ups. I actually thought it going to generate sounds more distinct to the marbles somehow. You know, like how a glass armonica has its own sound.
It is certainly at least one musical instrument, and arguably classifiable as a collection or combination of multiple instruments. I’m reminded of a Sesame Street animated video with accompanying song about the number “12.”
Takes a lot of balls to play that song around here.
I would say yes, because it does seem to have input from the musician with tempo and engaging/disengaging different parts of the machine to produce different sounds. It’s at least a hybrid between a music box/player piano and a traditional music instrument, in that it seems to be most dynamic when a human is at the controls.
It took me way too long to realise that the belts are made from Lego pieces.
I’d say it’s definitely an instrument though.
Its a variation on a mechanical musical instrument called am orchestrion. The main difference is that orchestrions usually (but not always) make sounds using pipes and percussion, whereas this version is a mixture of percussion and strings. I would say it is quite different from a Rube Goldberg machine, which is based on an elaborate series of steps to perform a simple task in an indirect and unnecessarily complex manner. This marble machine is much more simple than that, and in fact it really does the opposite of a Rube Goldberg machine – i.e. it allows a single user to perform a complex task (playing a multi-instrumental piece of music) in a relatively simple manner (performing complex bass, xylophone, and drum parts with only two hands).
Hurdy-gurdies and orchestrions are definitely musical instruments from an academic musicological point of view, I’ve read papers where their playing styles are picked over. There’s been a lot of reevaluation over the past few years, mostly because people have been compelled to accept that turntablism is a legitimate and expressive musical form.
Crank organs, hurdy-gurdies, music boxes, and later things like Chamberlins and phonorecords form a coherent tradition of music making and performance, enjoyed by people who wanted and needed to sustain their own musical culture, but were denied access to music education.
The elaborate design, time, and expense required to build this, and perfection of the final result makes me suspect that this is also CGI, like the previously mentioned machine that managed to suck in a lot of unsophisticated viewers with it’s clever claim of being built from farm equipment. Anybody want to run with this speculation?
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2016-03/02/marble-machine-video
Okay, if this is not real, it’s an amazingly well documented hoax. I once built a “clock” powered by ball bearings to illustrate the principle of Atwood’s pulley (For an episode of “The Edison Twins”). They are damn difficult to work with. Just getting them to feed from a hopper is next to impossible. So if this is really really real, it blows my mind completely.
When I saw that the video duration was 4:33 I wondered if the machine would play any music at all.
zaledalen @ 20:
FFS, you could have just gone straight to the video on yootube:
Then you could have gone to their website. Golly, all that, right at your fingertips. It’s a miracle or something.
Oh yes, forgot to add, you could also just go to Wintergatan’s channel, and watch all the videos of the machine being built. RIGHT HERE.
zaledalen @20:
If this is CGI, they put a a lot of effort into creating realistic plywood edge textures with wobbly pencil marks when they could have made it look like it was made out of an attractive hardwood, and an astonishing amount of effort into realistic bounce physics for the balls (which are traveling so fast you hardly see them) and wobble physics to make individual components of the machine wobble independently of one another.
It would probably be easier to build the thing and put that effort into fine-tuning it so it feeds smoothly (and notice that the elevator often fails to bring up its full complement of marbles, compensated by a large reservoir at the top, and a few have missed the funnels and ended up on the floor)
The musician reminds me of Jesse Eisenberg as Lex Luthor.
I not only believe it is real, I had also my mind blown. Thanks for sharing, PZ, you made my day.
In the related videos list on Youtube, there’s a video of the guy programming it and building it.
https://youtu.be/bwTdGVNWB1M
I see no difference between this and a group like Kraftwerk or an OK Go song (“Needing, Getting”). It still requires musical talent and knowledge to create melodic and rhythmic sounds, even if it’s more about producing than performing.
As for classification, I echo others in calling it a more complex hurdy gurdy.
Silly, totally silly!
I was going to say that they must have used a Laser cutter to make that but first I watch a video on the linked page and they printed out a pattern generated on a computer and used a ordinary shop tools
I am now thoroughly impressed!!
uncle frogy
There’s definitely a guitar built in there that the operator plays manually.
I hope they used decent quality plywood so that the machine doesn’t crumble away after a few months of storage. It looks kinda lightly made.
Trained musician here even though I am a retired blue collar worker (machinist):
These are what I call “sounds” as “music” involves tension and resolution. The composer and performer execute said tension and resolution back from the early Renaissance up through contemporary music. Congrats to the operator/constructor/assembler but I retain the “music” tag and do not apply it here.
@19+28
Hurdy-gurdies can’t really be compared to this instrument or other music boxes other than that they have a crank.
In a hurdy gurdy the crank is basically what a bow is to a fiddle, the mechanism by which the string is vibrated. The player of a hurdy gurdy pushes keys like a piano to change the length of certain strings. This instrument really has nothing to do with a hurdy-gurdy.
If a triangle is considered an instrument, so is this. Just… not a very easily mass produced one.
Guy sounds vaguely Norwegian (see build video). Whaddya say, PZ?
Like that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ta-8LU9EmaQ
Read what their youtube says. Wintergatan is swedish band, so the evidence points to this guy being swedish.
Awesome machine! Kudos to Wintergatan!!!
archangelospumoni:
You’re presumably describing a person’s perception of those sounds with terms like that, not properties of the sounds or their mathematical relations. So you’re saying you didn’t notice the tension and resolution of the harmonies and counterpoint, for instance? Or the rhythmic or metrical tension? Or in terms of how the contrasting timbres are juxtaposed to create a coherent structure with varying degrees of “tension” within it? You don’t have to be very trained at all to hear that stuff, although it helps in understanding it and recognizing when it is and isn’t present. It’s nothing very sophisticated in this case, but it certainly is there, like it is in a fucking motet, or a serialist piece, or a minimalist one, or in all sorts of shit that you do and don’t like … assuming that’s actually a defining feature of music that matters to anybody for any reason, which it probably isn’t.
Maybe you should listen more closely before you issue pointless decrees like this: simply and actually listen, first, then start doing some (probably still biased) analysis about what you think you heard. If you just mean that you don’t like it or it’s not very interesting musically, then say something like that. I’d say the same about P.D.Q. Bach’s garbage, as your pseudonym is apparently referencing. It’s a little ironic, or it shows a lack of self-awareness, that a fan of somebody who made fun of classical musicians (often for how pretentious and pompous some of them were) would say pretentious and pompous crap like this, not to mention that it’s also patently false and more than a little absurd.
I hit this and went “Wait…what?” and to my complete lack of surprise CR addressed it with far more rigour, authority, and snark than I can bring to bear.
The only definition of ‘music’ that I’ve heard that covers all its myriad forms: organised sound and silence. It seems to me that any narrower definition than that runs into the the subjective nature of personal preference. And even that definition might be to narrow, I’ve heard people argue about the ‘organised’ part…
Arrrgh, have an extra “o”. Use it wisely.
>90% of that machine is irrelevant to its putative employment to music-making. Its an extravagant fly-wheel powered mechanical device that plays some prepared template which the operator can selectively engage. Technologically, its an over-complicated version of player pianos from over a century ago that were powered by human feet on pedals. The ball bearings falling into slots isn’t a necessary feature of its output, and represents nothing but eye-candy to the contraption as well as unnecessary weight. It isn’t a musical instrument at all. its a performance art piece, suitable, say, for Burning Man.
See also this. It’s a programmable instrument; doesn’t make it any less of an instrument.
An organ is also a combination of instruments (brass, woodwinds, and don’t forget all those percussive pedals!), and yet we still call it an instrument.
This was great to watch.
@anchor #42
I am no expert on music, but to me it seems that those two options are not mutually exclusive.
Shouldn’t the arguments against be more along the lines of:
First we had No True Music and now No True Instrument. Sheesh.