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Watch this Swede’s incredible marble machine play music

He's making a noise with a unique instrument that creates music using 2000 marbles.

Published: 2 March 2016 16:34 CET
Watch this Swede's incredible marble machine play music
Gothenburg musician Martin Molin with the unusual contraption. Photo: Samuel Westergren
The unusual wooden machine, crafted by musician Martin Molin, 33, makes tunes using marbles which travel along tracks and interact with drums, cymbals and a vibrophone.
 
Using engineering and physics expertise, the contraption is powered using a hand crank which kick starts the process, mobilizing a central wheel which shoots the small round balls into action.
 
The impressive music created sounds as if it has been produced by multiple musicians or a complex computer programme.
 
 
A video of the completed project, produced by fellow Swede Hannes Knutsson, had scored more than 55,000 views by 5pm on Wednesday, after being uploaded just a day earlier.
 
Meanwhile social media also cranked into action as fellow Swedes and global fans alike sounded off about the invention.

Molin, who hails from Karlstad in central Sweden, but is now based in Gothenburg and plays in the band Wintergatan, spent 14 months bringing his idea to life, despite first imagining it would only take two.
 
He recently joked on the project's website that the initiative had been far more tricky than he imagined.
 
“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,” he said. 
 
“We need to start making music now and spend less time picking up marbles from the floor soon soon soon. But it is happening.”

CULTURE

New songs mark sixth anniversary of French star Johnny Hallyday’s death

Fans of the late Johnny Hallyday, "the French Elvis Presley", will be able to commemorate the sixth anniversary of his death with two songs never released before.

Published: 17 November 2023 09:05 CET
New songs mark sixth anniversary of French star Johnny Hallyday's death

Hallyday, blessed with a powerful husky voice and seemingly boundless energy, died in December 2017, aged 74, of lung cancer after a long music and acting career.

After an estimated 110 million records sold during his lifetime – making him one of the world’s best-selling singers -Hallyday’s success has continued unabated beyond his death.

Almost half of his current listeners on Spotify are under the age of 35, according to the streaming service, and a posthumous greatest hits collection of “France’s favourite rock’n’roller”, whose real name was Jean-Philippe Leo
Smet, sold more than half a million copies.

The two new songs, Un cri (A cry) and Grave-moi le coeur (Engrave my heart), are featured on two albums published by different labels which also contain already-known hits in remastered or symphonic versions.

Un cri was written in 2017 by guitarist and producer Maxim Nucci – better known as Yodelice – who worked with Hallyday during the singer’s final years.

At the time Hallyday had just learned that his cancer had returned, and he “felt the need to make music outside the framework of an album,” Yodelice told reporters this week.

Hallyday recorded a demo version of the song, accompanied only by an acoustic blues guitar, but never brought it to full production.

Sensing the fans’ unbroken love for Hallyday, Yodelice decided to finish the job.

He separated the voice track from the guitar which he felt was too tame, and arranged a rockier, full-band accompaniment.

“It felt like I was playing with my buddy,” he said.

The second song, Grave-moi le coeur, is to be published in December under the artistic responsibility of another of the singer’s close collaborators, the arranger Yvan Cassar.

Hallyday recorded the song – a French version of Elvis’s Love Me Tender – with a view to performing it at a 1996 show in Las Vegas.

But in the end he did not play it live, opting instead for the original English-language version, and did not include it in any album.

“This may sound crazy, but the song was on a rehearsal tape that had never been digitalised,” Cassar told AFP.

The new songs are unlikely to be the last of new Hallyday tunes to delight fans, a source with knowledge of his work said. “There’s still a huge mass of recordings out there spanning his whole career,” the source said.

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