The goal is not to make music, or even to have a musical instrument. The goal is to have a music machine that is visually impressive *because* of its complexity.
Some people already mentioned he could use computers for this. Well, sure! He could even use off-the-shelf mechanical triggers if he wanted to keep it using 100% acoustic instruments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvQ0UXOyh7A
But even if he wanted to stay in the mechanical realm and have reliability for touring, he could just build something centered on music boxes or piano players, which people have been doing for hundreds of years. Bjork toured with music boxes in the past! Those things could just trigger the vibraphone, bass and drums directly via hammers, instead of needing marbles to do the job... Heck, even if he still wants marbles, he could just have a music machine trigger marbles, and buy LOTS of marbles at the top just to avoid that "marble recycling" mechanism.
But a traditional music box is established technology, so it wouldn't be as impressive. And the marbles need to go up and down for drama, if you just have a giant bucket full of them, it's not that impressive anymore... the marbles must be integrated into the "memory" mechanism, etc etc...
So his goal is to have something that is impossibly complicated like a Rube Goldberg Machine. It has to be large and impressive, and each part has to be bespoke and interesting by itself.
Sure it's not the best engineering, but this is what made the first video viral after all :/
I think of it as an art project rather than an engineering project. His medium is CAD software and CNC, and the purpose of the machine is to make more art. There should be more engineering-heavy art in the world like this.
The goal is not to make music, or even to have a musical instrument. The goal is to have a music machine that is visually impressive *because* of its complexity.
Some people already mentioned he could use computers for this. Well, sure! He could even use off-the-shelf mechanical triggers if he wanted to keep it using 100% acoustic instruments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvQ0UXOyh7A
But even if he wanted to stay in the mechanical realm and have reliability for touring, he could just build something centered on music boxes or piano players, which people have been doing for hundreds of years. Bjork toured with music boxes in the past! Those things could just trigger the vibraphone, bass and drums directly via hammers, instead of needing marbles to do the job... Heck, even if he still wants marbles, he could just have a music machine trigger marbles, and buy LOTS of marbles at the top just to avoid that "marble recycling" mechanism.
But a traditional music box is established technology, so it wouldn't be as impressive. And the marbles need to go up and down for drama, if you just have a giant bucket full of them, it's not that impressive anymore... the marbles must be integrated into the "memory" mechanism, etc etc...
So his goal is to have something that is impossibly complicated like a Rube Goldberg Machine. It has to be large and impressive, and each part has to be bespoke and interesting by itself.
Sure it's not the best engineering, but this is what made the first video viral after all :/