Here’s what an instrument powered by 2,000 marbles sounds like

For American television viewers of the 1970s, The Magnificent Marble Machine was a gimmicky, short-lived game show centered around a giant pinball machine. The strange NBC daytime series probably owed its existence to the Tommy–fueled popularity of pinball at the time and lives on mostly as an answer to trivia questions today. Four decades after that show’s cancellation, a Swedish band called Wintergatan have unveiled an even more magnificent marble machine: a fully-functioning, hand-cranked keyboard instrument capable of playing original music. The ungainly wooden contraption, a marvel of gears and pulleys, made its debut on Tuesday in a four-and-a-half-minute demonstration video on YouTube. Against a stark white backdrop, musician and composer Martin Molin performs his own untitled composition on this custom-built instrument, which uses 2,000 individual marbles. By manipulating various levers, Molin is able to make the marbles travel up convey belts and then drop down through chutes into metal keys, much like those of a xylophone. It’s quite ingenious, as well as fun to see and hear.