Wintergatan - Marble Machine (music instrument using 2000 marbles)

Wintergatan · 294M views · 2016-03-02 · 4:33

Open on YouTube ↗

If playback is restricted in your region, try opening the original video. Use Mark watched to add it to your marked videos.

Overview

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.

On Hacker News

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.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2018–2025

Topics

Magic, puzzles & curiosities Mechanical & precision engineering Music performance & songs

What people said

nosianu · 2021-09 · Recommendation
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 can see that the machine can just play a pre-configured song, but the operator can add and/or change a lot while running it to create variations of that pre-configured song. The machine is programmable, so that song could be changed.
Read the original HN comment ↗

thatswrong0 · 2019-09 · Recommendation
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]
Read the original HN comment ↗

cess11 · 2025-05 · Reference
She's really good. Here's an example of her covering a well known piece by Morricone: [LINK] From the headline I kind of expected it to be about some more contrived apparatus, something that was built ad hoc and is constantly close to self-disassembling from being used, like Wintergatan's Marble Machine: [VIDEO]
Read the original HN comment ↗

Sources

Video by Wintergatan, played through YouTube.

HN Library · Source license

Data and selection notes

HN summaries and labels may contain AI errors. HN dates refer to discussions, not video publication.

HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

Views, duration and playback status refresh separately from the published catalog. When an update fails, existing data remains visible.

Selection checks

SaaS & AI candidates: Topic keywords do not match
Editor-approved picks: Editorial review is required

Rule matches identify candidates. They do not guarantee video quality or financial results.

About the library and its sources