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

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 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.

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

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 :/

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.

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.

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

1:40

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

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

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.

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

TLDR: speed governor

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Or, in Software development terms:

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

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.

That’s a hard balance.

_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.

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"

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.

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.

https://youtu.be/BpJYqC4PWEw

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.

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.)

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 :-) ).

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

That was the last video I watched.

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.

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.

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

https://bea.st/absolut-quartet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!)

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.

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.

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.