Pinball Music Machine?

[JonPurpleHaze]

They call them marbles but they look like pinball's to me so I'm sticking with the title. I really like the machine by itself and am not sure about the dude in the headphones or the need for music. Whatever it does, it looks like it's got shiny silver balls and I want one.

Wintergatan - Marble Machine (music instrument using 2000 marbles)



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[sleepy]

Yo! Wars have been fought over machines such as this. And the intent of it.

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

over at reddit, some of the snobs in the pinball sub were saying stuff like "no way, that would never actually work continuously... it must have been multiple takes patched together!" as well as "if those were REAL pinballs, they would have torn that thing apart!"

bunch of wankers.

i love that thing. a particularly german touch in that you have to crank it by hand, like an antique corn shucker or something.

 

[Coil_Smoke]

WOW...I don't know what else to say. But it did remind me of my second digital computer. Does anyone else remember the " Digi-Comp II " . It too deployed cascading balls(Marbles) performing simple binary functions. Marbles triggered mechanical devices like logic gates, registers and flip-flops by rolling down an inclined plane(Playfield ?) . DigiComp 2 was sold in toy stores and was little more than a table top toy. it simulated electronic logic circuits using marbles instead of electrons. It preceded Digi Comp 1, which had several layers of plastic shifters cycled back and forth by hand. It was programmed by placing little plastic tubes on pegs at the back of the machine. Both of these toy computers had binary readouts. I know DigiComp 1 had 3 bits capable of counting to 7. Maybe DigiComp2 had a 4 bit accumulator performing simple mathematic operations up to 15.[Edit:After checking the Digi Com 2 had a 7 bit capacity] I would love to still have those things.

 

[Coil_Smoke]

Well, It appears a new DigiComp 2 is available since 2011. There is a video of it multiplying two numbers on their web page @ http://shop.evilmadscientist.com/productsmenu/tinykitlist/375-dcii

 

[sleepy]

Looks like the current Digi-Comp uses metal balls instead of marbles.
That makes sense since the device then only needs simple electric contact to
the steelies/pinballs to output the results as a stack. Each ball can represent a 1 state and be uniform in bit-to-voltage value up to the maximum.