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WOW!!!!!!!!
Chris Katko
Member #1,881
January 2002
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video

-----sig:
“Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.” - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
"Political Correctness is fascism disguised as manners" --George Carlin

Bob Keane
Member #7,342
June 2006

Interesting.

By reading this sig, I, the reader, agree to render my soul to Bob Keane. I, the reader, understand this is a legally binding contract and freely render my soul.
"Love thy neighbor as much as you love yourself means be nice to the people next door. Everyone else can go to hell. Missy Cooper.
The advantage to learning something on your own is that there is no one there to tell you something can't be done.

Bruce Perry
Member #270
April 2000

Cool :)

--
Bruce "entheh" Perry [ Web site | DUMB | Set Up Us The Bomb !!! | Balls ]
Programming should be fun. That's why I hate C and C++.
The brxybrytl has you.

amarillion
Member #940
January 2001
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I was going to say, rebuild it in minecraft! But of course somebody already did that:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-59AB6VaNyo

LennyLen
Member #5,313
December 2004
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I was going to say, rebuild it in minecraft

Nothing is real until it has been recreated in Minecraft.

Neil Roy
Member #2,229
April 2002
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Wow indeed! Amazing. I wonder how long that took to build? Finding problems (bugs) with it must have been a real pain!

---
“I love you too.” - last words of Wanda Roy

bamccaig
Member #7,536
July 2006
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I say we ban the OP for his spammy thread title. I haven't watched the OP yet.

Append:

It seems the "machine" is mostly electronic. The fact that it appears to have a track recorded on it as peeks and valleys makes it seem much less impressive. Despite the amount of the work that went into it, it seems like mostly a waste of time. And I haven't finished watching the "how it works" video, but seeing marbles "randomly" channel into rows makes me question if it's real at all. Lastly, he admits that he records each sound on a separate track and edits the shit out of it after. That completely negates the entire machine because modern day software could make just about anything sound like music, and if this one requires heavy editing to make it sound like that then what's the point?

LennyLen
Member #5,313
December 2004
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bamccaig said:

what's the point?

What's the point to anything?

bamccaig
Member #7,536
July 2006
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Having watched a bit more about this machine, I conclude that the "point" was actually ad-revenue on YouTube. And probably the guy happens to be a skilled musician and handy with construction. For that, this project is cool. And I was somewhat wrong in that the machine does seem to use marbles for all sounds (except for achieving custom notes/chords on the guitar with the user must do, but apparently the guitar is still played by marbles). I still find myself questioning just how reliable it is, if it really works well enough to practically use (or if marbles might just fall imperfectly, bounce, and throw the machine into some sort of chaos). I think that it's impressive, but I think that the more you see it deconstructed the less amazing it seems. In 2017, this doesn't seem like so much of a great accomplishment (deserving of the subject line, "WOW!!!!!!!!"). It seems more like a well executed hack deserving of admiration and a few minutes of smiles and clicks. Had the machine functioned acoustically I think it would have been far more impressive. Creating a machine for digital output no matter how out of the way you go to achieve it always seems sort of meaningless: machines already exist to produce any output you can imagine/dream up. The hard part isn't generating digital output. It's generating outputs that are significantly difficult to generate, such as [pseudo-]intelligence.

Chris Katko
Member #1,881
January 2002
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bamccaig said:

I say we ban the OP for his spammy thread title.

If nobody has banned you yet, that leaves me plenty of room for antics without fear of banning. ;)

-----sig:
“Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.” - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
"Political Correctness is fascism disguised as manners" --George Carlin

Bruce Perry
Member #270
April 2000

blambleeblams, your musings reminded me of a story in which someone balanced Maltesers® on the strings of a grand piano, leading to hilarity when the soloist began a piece that started with a strong chord (say the Grieg Piano Concerto). I was in fits for a few minutes, much to the surprise of the person who told the story and the person who was formally trying to help us both with whatever lecture course it was :)

video

[EDIT: not the best performance - no prizes for guessing why I clicked on that one :-* The comments are funny...]

--
Bruce "entheh" Perry [ Web site | DUMB | Set Up Us The Bomb !!! | Balls ]
Programming should be fun. That's why I hate C and C++.
The brxybrytl has you.

Niunio
Member #1,975
March 2002
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I don't undertand bamccaig comments. ???

I mean, it is a big "music box". The spigots move levers that release the marbles that fall and hits the xylophone, percusion and bass gitar strings that produce sounds, then marbles are gathered and returned to the hoopers by the conveyor belt and it starts again.

Of course it is edited. Any video should be edited, specially those that aims to do some artistical stuff. And anybody who has done* any serious video recording knows what happens if you don't record sound correctly.

And of course the video was created to gather visits. That's why YouTube was invented for.

[This message was edited a lot trying to explain it better, English isn't my first language there * should be some errors]

-----------------
Current projects: Allegro.pas | MinGRo

Bruce Perry
Member #270
April 2000

I wonder if the video can be difficult for some people to identify with (though of course this will be subjective), and maybe bambams didn't identify and therefore subconsciously decided there was something he didn't like about it. That could then be rationalised into a decomposition of what was involved to try and make it seem less impressive.

In my case, my rational side kicked in and told me that it's an impressive accomplishment and must be recognised as such, but here are a few things I can say would have made me appreciate the video more if even just one of them were there:

  • Speaking to the camera, smiling, showing some personality and potentially some interest in me as a viewer

  • True expressiveness in the music, as proven over centuries by the classical composers (some more than others though) - as in you can sense something good of the composer's personality when you listen to it

  • No white backing, instead an environment that I could imagine wanting to be in

What got me on to this train of thought is that bambams said some nice things when I started uploading my compositions. Hopefully what I achieved was the second one in that list :)

For good measure, here's a comment my piano teacher made once which I will never forget: "Brahms is an example of a composer who never wrote a single note that he didn't put his heart into. He was a good eehhhgg!" <3

--
Bruce "entheh" Perry [ Web site | DUMB | Set Up Us The Bomb !!! | Balls ]
Programming should be fun. That's why I hate C and C++.
The brxybrytl has you.

bamccaig
Member #7,536
July 2006
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My cynicism was due to not understanding the machine and being skeptical of its feasibility based on the way the video was shot (only seeing cuts of particular pieces, not how it all fits together). Once I had seen how it worked most of that disappeared. I still think it's somewhat crude and wonder if it works as well as it seems to, but either way it's quite an accomplishment. The "how it works" video is a must for anybody with a skeptical outlook though. It's really neat how it's programmable.

Append:

Just read Bruce's last post, and I have to agree. I think any of these things would have made the video much more pleasant and make me more easily accept it. The environment that it was shot in seemed so controlled that the entire thing seemed like an elaborate hoax at first.

LennyLen
Member #5,313
December 2004
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In my case, my rational side kicked in and told me that it's an impressive accomplishment and must be recognised as such, but here are a few things I can say would have made me appreciate the video more if even just one of them were there:

I think points 2 and 3 can be somewhat reconciled with this:

video

Johan Halmén
Member #1,550
September 2001

I'd replace all acoustic elements with sensors that trigger midi events. That way one wouldn't have to edit the recorded sound. Only set up a multitimbral synth to play the events. In fact, I'm about to build a midi interface to my Microbit. I have a pressure sensor and a piece of a PCB with three buttons on it, taken from an old matrix printer. All this I'm going to turn into a midi trumpet. If it works, the next thing will be a midi trombone. And a laser harp. And a theremin.

I'm with bambam here, kind of. I think the machine should really create sound that needn't editing and mixing. The machine should be able to produce the music when placed on stage. Though it might be that it does all that. But for the Youtube video, the music was recorded and edited like a multitrack, multimike recording, just like any band would do.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Years of thorough research have revealed that the red "x" that closes a window, really isn't red, but white on red background.

Years of thorough research have revealed that what people find beautiful about the Mandelbrot set is not the set itself, but all the rest.

Bruce Perry
Member #270
April 2000

I want to buy a harp at some point :)

--
Bruce "entheh" Perry [ Web site | DUMB | Set Up Us The Bomb !!! | Balls ]
Programming should be fun. That's why I hate C and C++.
The brxybrytl has you.

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