The Marble Machine: When 2000 Marbles Make Music Of The Spheres

Three thousand machine parts. Two thousand marbles. Fourteen months. One magical musical instrument — the Marble Machine.

A creation of Swedish musician Martin Molin, the Wintergatan Marble Machine is a crank-operated music box that uses 2,000 steel marbles to make a delightfully “marblesque” music, which can henceforth be a genre by itself.

The Marble Machine is a completely hand-made artifact and took Molin almost 14 long months to make, a timeframe he had not anticipated initially. (When he had started work on the machine in late 2014, he gave himself just two months to wrap up the whole thing.)

This is what Molin, 33, wrote on his website before the contraption’s completion.

The closer the machine gets to be finished the harder it gets to finish it. It is strange how that happens, when the finish line is in sight, everything slows down automatically except the avalanche of new unforeseen problems. We need to start making music now and spend less time picking up marbles from the floor soon soon soon. But it is happening. When it is finished, music will follow.”

The music did follow, on February 29, when Molin debuted his machine on YouTube, playing an original composition on it that is also, incidentally, known as “Marble Machine,” according to a Daily Mail report.

Here’s the video of the man and his machine, filmed by Hannes Knutsson.

Reminiscent of Rube Goldberg inventions with their convoluted, chain-reaction-based functioning, Molin’s machine is a marvel of patient craftsmanship: hand-made programming wheel, wooden gears, sizzle cymbal, vibraphone funnels, marble-lifting contraption, wooden tracks for the marbles, and the marbles themselves, all 2,000 of them.

Molin has a rather philosophical outlook towards these marbles. This is how he describes them in an interview with Wired.

The marbles, you know, they behave like water. The nature of water is that it just breaks through everything. After 100,000 years it can make a hole in stone. The marbles act like that, it doesn’t matter what I’m doing to try to tame them. They are just flooding every wall I’m putting up.”

There are two clear sources of inspiration for Molin’s wood-music combo adventure.

The first is the woodwork expert Matthias Wandels, whom Molin found on YouTube and whose work just blew him away.

The second is a visit to the Speelklok Museum in Utrecht, The Netherlands, in 2014. The Speelklok is a unique museum dedicated solely to automated musical instruments. Taking in the variety of music boxes present there, Molin was inspired to build one for himself too. He also brought in his fascination for woodwork into the picture. So these twin fascinations, wood and music, came together in one project.

According to Wired, there’s an already-existing “subculture” of marble machines, and it has had a significant impact on Molin. In that sense, his Marble Machine is not an isolated piece of machinery from any angle.

In 2011, Sisu Devices and Intel had come together to make the Animusic Machine. Unlike the Marble Machine, which is a hand-crafted and hand-operated machine, the Animusic Machine was totally automatic.

Molin, the lead musician of a band called Wintergatan, plans to take the Marble Machine with him on his music tours. However, there is a big problem with that plan right now, as he explained to the Huffington Post.

The machine is too big to travel with. Right now I cannot get it out through the door from the place I built it in without deconstructing it. I will build a smaller motorized music box that we will take with us on tour and it will act as a fifth member of the band.”

There is one other issue with the machine: Molin can’t write lengthy pieces for it. Due to the technical constraints, he has to keep his musical compositions short. But he likes this limitation because it forces him to get more creative with his music.

In the coming days, Molin plans to write music for his Marble Machine that is slower and more “melancholic.”

[Image via YouTube/Wintergatan]