THE VIDEO SHELF · mechanical music instruments
Wintergatan - Marble Machine (music instrument using 2000 marbles)
Wintergatan's video of the Marble Machine, a hand-built music instrument that plays a song using about 2000 marbles on a mechanical clockwork-style mechanism.
Why HN readers recommended it
HN treats it as the canonical example of a Rube Goldberg style musical instrument and a work of love, and references it in threads on unconventional instruments and machines.
This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.
Video & recommendation details
- Creator / channel
- Wintergatan
- Topic
- mechanical music instruments
- Format
- music
- Level
- general
- HN recommenders in dataset
- 2
- HN mentions in dataset
- 10
- Recommendation years in dataset
- 2018–2025
These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.
From the original HN conversations
Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.
Absolutely. This thing is a work of love. Original video that inspired this Minecraft recreation: [VIDEO] And the rest of his WIP videos for the "Marble Machine X": [LINK]
thatswrong0 on Hacker News · 2019-09
In Wintergatan's Marble Machine in Minecraft [video]Here is something similar ("useless" complex machine made from wood) that somebody made to create music: "Wintergatan - Marble Machine (music instrument using 2000 marbles)" [VIDEO] The video shows the details pretty well too, and the piece being played is of quite good quality. One …
nosianu on Hacker News · 2021-09
In Art student’s 407-piece hand-carved wooden clock (2016)
Summaries, classifications and recommendation records are from the HackerTube source dataset. Read about this library and its limitations.