Swedish musician creates incredible song using 2000 marbles

A Swedish music whizz has tapped into the power of marbles to create an incredible Rube Goldberg contraption – the output of which is then sampled and mixed.

Martin Molin spent the best part of 14 months building the machine which is made of 3,000 moving parts.

The invention requires the musician to pull a series of levers before 2,000 marbles are sent whirring around the music making machine, dropping on cymbals, clattering onto xylophone keys and clanging into guitar strings using funnels, pulleys, and tubes.

As the devices cycles it activates a vibraphone, bass, kick drum, cymbal and other instruments that play a score programmed into a 32 bar loop.

Molin tells WIRED the project was directly inspired by the existing marble machine subculture (“I stumbled over the marble machine culture — it’s a whole subculture — and was always interested in gears, and the future of gears…”) but with the aim of building more than a single-use demo box.

“Marble machines always make music, but I was thinking maybe I can make a programmable marble machine, that doesn’t make chaos but is actually controllable in the sounds it makes,” Molin said.

Swedish band Wintergatan will play live concerts starting from summer 2016.