7 ms·
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 fundamen
by calibas 3y ago
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 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y83I8mLKufo
Testing the new fly wheel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ouH21npL58 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ouH21npL58
- datadrivenangel 3y agoHe'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.
- rallemoose 3y agoPain is temporary. Glory is forever.
- dodslaser 3y ago*bittersweet angle grinder noises*
- nextaccountic 3y agoI 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 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
- fho 3y agoThere 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.
- iforgotpassword 3y agoDo you have a link? I've been watching the channel on and off but never seen that. Sounds heartbreaking.
- Aloha 3y agoWatching him has been watching the second system effect in real time.
- guhcampos 3y agoI 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.
- danpalmer 3y ago> 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.
- pests 3y agoThe 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.
- danpalmer 3y agoYeah 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.
- Aardwolf 3y agoIt 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.
- Rapzid 3y agoThat's most people's web 3.0 experience lol.
- pests 3y agoI 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.
- bborud 3y agoThis 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.
- idiotsecant 3y agoIs 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.
- bborud 3y agoFrom 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.
- whstl 3y agoIMO 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 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 :/
- yummypaint 3y agoI 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.
- whstl 3y agoThe 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.
- zerr 3y agoHow does he convert a variable speed hand motion to a constant speed rolling? Some spring mechanism?
- pests 3y agoA problem solved by old music machines. Here's his recent video on it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i63t7ekNFoY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i63t7ekNFoY TLDR: speed governor
- zerr 3y agoCool! Another question: how are those actual song drums/cylinders made? i.e. how are songs programmed? Especially interested in those old machine drums.
- whstl 3y agoYou 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 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 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 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 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 https://youtu.be/IYpnzSJGE-c?feature=shared&t=12 I'm sure there were other techniques along the way too.
- 3y ago
- donor20 3y agoMy 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
- calibas 3y agoHe 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.
- beAbU 3y agoThis 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.
- calibas 3y agoProfessional 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.