Earlier this week, Swedish musician Martin Molin unveiled the Wintergatan Marble Machine. It's a giant hand-cranked (as well as hand-made) music box that produces the sounds of a snare drum, kick drum, cymbals, bass, vibraphone, and more — all with the help of around 2,000 marbles.
Not only is the Marble Machine an impressive feat of musical ingenuity, it's a work of art that must be seen to be believed and appreciated — a stunningly beautiful piece of modern steampunkery. There are around 3,000 internal parts (all designed by hand) including tracks, gears, pulleys and funnels, which work together to wrangle and route the marbles in different ways to produce the appropriate instrumental sounds.
Molin began working on the machine in August of 2014, and hoped to have it completed in two months. However, as the ideas and designs grew more and more complex, those two months turned into fourteen.
"It is strange how that happens," Molin recently commented on his YouTube channel (which followed the construction progress), "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."
In an interview with Wired UK, Molin spoke of the unruliness of working with that many marbles: "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. ... I'll have to fix some escaping marble issues in order to tour."
Don't expect to see the Marble Machine on tour anytime soon, unfortunately — the instrument needs to be completely disassembled to be moved.
In less than two days, an uploaded YouTube video of Molin and his Marble Machine (filmed by Hannes Knutsson) went super-viral, skyrocketing past one million views. See the amazing machine in action in the video below.
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