Wintergatan - Marble Machine
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For those who remember this:
AniMusic: Pipe Dream – 03:24
— HQ4you2And the real-life attempt to mimic it:
Intel real life Pipe Dream instruments - Animusic – [01:28..04:37] 04:37
— alz3abi123and
Animusic Machine – 03:15
— quewlvidI've just found:
Wintergatan - Marble Machine (music instrument using 2000 marbles) – 04:33
— Wintergatan
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Yep, those guys make awesome music. I shared that video in one of the other threads around here (status thread?) and @blakeyrat said they weren't marbles because they had silver paint on them. Or maybe they actually are not marbles and he's right.
EDIT: for reference https://what.thedailywtf.com/t/status/1673/40879
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Most marbles aren't marble anyway; they're glass. I don't see any reason why "marbles" can be made from glass, but not metal.
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I wish they showed better how it's making the electric bass sound. I'm assuming there are strings in there and marbles plunking them, but I couldn't see it. Without seeing how it's producing those sounds, it almost sounds like there's an accompanying track playing.
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You have a real knack for posting stuff from yesterday.
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I wish they showed better how it's making the electric bass sound. I'm assuming there are strings in there and marbles plunking them, but I couldn't see it. Without seeing how it's producing those sounds, it almost sounds like there's an accompanying track playing.
It is at roughly the one minute mark.
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Ok, I suppose they could be marbles painted in silver paint.
But that's stupid because they're obviously ball bearings, and the paint would rub off in like 10 minutes.
Which I don't blame him for using ball bearings, because for a machine you need guarantees that they're all the exact same size, have no flat spots, won't shatter after a fall, etc. Which ball bearings give you. Glass marbles would not.
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It is at roughly the one minute mark.
1:03 – 1:10, to be more precise.
The "making of" video shows him taking a — I guess you'd call it semi-acoustic — bass guitar, sanding the varnish off the body (for raisins; I guess to match the raw plywood look of the rest of the machine), and mounting it.
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@anotherusername said:
I wish they showed better how it's making the electric bass sound. I'm assuming there are strings in there and marbles plunking them, but I couldn't see it. Without seeing how it's producing those sounds, it almost sounds like there's an accompanying track playing.
It is at roughly the one minute mark.
wow, I actually did see that the first time through and completely did not see what I was looking at.But that's stupid because they're obviously ball bearings, and the paint would rub off in like 10 minutes.
Which I don't blame him for using ball bearings, because for a machine you need guarantees that they're all the exact same size, have no flat spots, won't shatter after a fall, etc. Which ball bearings give you. Glass marbles would not.
There is no specific reason why a "marble" has to be glass or a "ball bearing" has to be metal, so there is literally no difference between a "marble" and a "ball bearing". Here, look. Pages and pages of glass ball bearings.
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Was that a complaint?... :/
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Nah. I am also too lazy to make a "Doing your job" joke. Plus, it was cool enough to post twice.
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Never seen these videos before and thought they were awesome.
unlike the people at the end of the Intel demo who all kinda went "err... wooo..." - understated geeks, I guess...
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This all looks like those overly overengineered solutions to simple problems we are seeing every day on our jobs.
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Most marbles aren't marble anyway; they're glass. I don't see any reason why "marbles" can be made from glass, but not metal.
they're obviously ball bearings
I agree with Blakey on this one, and so does the dictionary.
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I agree with Blakey on this one, and so does the dictionary.
I can remember having a nice ball bearing that I used as a marble at school. It was good because it made for a great target for everyone to shoot at as it moved around less if knocked into by an ordinary marble.
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I can remember having a nice ball bearing that I used as a marble at school. It was good because it made for a great target for everyone to shoot at as it moved around less if knocked into by an ordinary marble.
I fucking love marbles and ball bearings. I don't know why though (INB4 somebody says "simple things please simple minds").
You can have more fun with ball bearings than marbles, especially when you pair them with electromagnets :-)
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Even permanent magnets can be pretty cool.
A Simple Magnetic Rail Gun – 01:14
— Jeff Regester
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Ball bearings that are permanent magnets are great fun, by all accounts. But also dangerous and illegal.
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Well maybe it's only the tiny ones. I was thinking of Buckyballs.
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It says "or similar material", and as far as I can tell the primary attributes of glass that make it suitable for marbles is that it's hard, dense, and can be shaped easily into relatively good spheres, which would include metal.
Also, according to that dictionary, plastic and glass ball bearings don't exist.
Anyway, here's what Wikipedia has to say:
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That sounds like cheating to me.
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Ball bearings that are permanent magnets are great fun, by all accounts. But also dangerous and illegal.
Well maybe it's only the tiny ones. I was thinking of Buckyballs.
I think some of the over protective places said you can't make them toys cause kids will eat them or something like that. They are still sold though so maybe that is what you were thinking of.
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Just finished watching all the build log videos and listening to their other music. That guy is amazing, and makes me feel incredibly unaccomplished.
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For those curious, they released two How It Works videos:
How It Works - Part 1 (Wintergatan Marble Machine) – 11:14
— Wintergatan
How It Works - Part 2 (Wintergatan Marble Machine) – 09:43
— Wintergatan
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Does he explain why he put electronics in it? RUINING EVERYTHING!
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Does he explain why he put electronics in it? RUINING EVERYTHING!
Actually, the only electronics in it are the microphones. There isn't even an overlaid track, everything you hear in the song is actually being produced by the machine and being picked up by microphones. Watch the first How It Works video.
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In the first video he shows a big ol' mixer panel thing in it. Like a drum machine looking thing.
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In the first video he shows a big ol' mixer panel thing in it. Like a drum machine looking thing.
Well yeah, he needs to be able to filter out the background noise of the room and marbles and control the relative volumes of everything.
The drums are actually contact microphones - they sound like drums when the marbles hit them.
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Also they aren't marbles!
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Also they aren't marbles!
I'm only calling them what he himself calls them. If he's wrong, I'm wrong too, but at least I'm using the same terminology.
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In the first video he shows a big ol' mixer panel thing in it. Like a drum machine looking thing.
Or more like a... mixer panel? You know, for mixing the microphones?
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Now available for purchase on Bandcamp for 8 SEK (~$1 USD) if anyone is interested:
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I'm only calling them what he himself calls them
At least, he calls them "steel ball bearing marbles" in the video. So :p
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Actually, the only electronics in it are the microphones.
Yeeeeah, that bass guitar isn't acoustic either. He even shows how it sounds just picked up by the mics (spoiler: not very well).
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So for those of you who want to see the machine 'in the wood' so to speak: he's building a new one that's actually suitable for performances, and the original is going to the Museum Speelklok in Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Meet the Retired Marble Machine at Speelklok Museum – 14:27
— Wintergatan
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So the original machine worked only 90-95% of the time and they apparently had to edit 60 days worth of recordings together for the entire track to get played successfully. Shortly after he started planning to build a Marble Machine X which would simply work right.
Now you can see the first Proof Of Concept drum track tried on his new machine:
Marble Machine X Plays Drums! #86 – [04:06..05:55] 05:55
— WintergatanStill lots of work to go, but meanwhile you can check out his "making of" videos to see how it all fits together.
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@PJH said in Wintergatan - Marble Machine:
And the real-life attempt to mimic it:
Intel real life Pipe Dream instruments - Animusic – [01:28..04:37] 04:37
— alz3abi123and
Animusic Machine – 03:15
— quewlvidTIL. That's pretty cool. I feel like the song lost a bit of its soul thought. It's too sped up.
I'd have preferred to see Acoustic Curves or Resonant Chamber btw, although it wouldn't have looked as impressive.@PJH said in Wintergatan - Marble Machine:
I've just found:
Wintergatan - Marble Machine (music instrument using 2000 marbles) – 04:33
— WintergatanThis video gets suggested to me a lot.
Edit: replying to a three year-old post.
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5 years later and the guy surely lost some marbles along the way (thanks to picking form over function several times over).
He's working on getting 99.999% reliability though, with magic like this:
Marble Tracks with Hidden Feature – 17:47
— Wintergatan(The technique by which they run slower than you'd expect is explained here.)
Marble Machine, by Wintergatan
