[krisoft]

He was always clear on his expectations. He wants to make a machine he can take on a world tour. That's his stated goal.

The consequence of that is that it has to be reliable enough to play through a full concert without maintenance or breakdown, and it has to be robust enough that it can be transported from place to place. These are his hard requirements.

Then there are some less well defined requirements. Which is that the machine has to play nice music and has to be a marble machine as Martin understands it.

This last is the real constraint. Otherwise he could just buy a midi keyboard which would fulfil all the requirements about reliability, robustness and quality of music, but would fail the spirit of the endeavour.

[okamiueru]

All the things you describe, are all reasonable constraints and goals. However, the issue is in chasing sub millisecond standard deviations. Which is amusingly the point at which you might as well buy a midi keyboard.

[kristofferc]

Where does "tight music" come into those constraints.

[andersa]

I remember watching his videos on this topic and never being able to hear any difference between the supposed "good" and "bad" examples.

[krisoft]

I count that under the first of the two fuzzy constraints I wrote about: “the machine has to play nice music”

I agree that there Martin seems to be aiming for a very high degree of repeatability in timing, but it also seems that he has designs which meet those expectations of his and this was not the reason why he abandoned the second attempt. (Ad far as i can tell based on the videos.)

[sbuttgereit]

I have to admit, I find this a bit ironic.

Many of the digital sequencing and notation products I've worked with went out of their way (arguably) to play "less-tight music" through various "humanizing" features.

Yes, we want music that is sufficiently accurate and "tight"... but within the confines of human capability. The slight errors of both time and intonation in some cases give music a much more human feel. Now to be fair, I don't want to suggest that this sort of human inaccuracy is mere randomness either: it's typically not just random error... there's usually a bias and it definitely within limits (unless you're a bad musician of course :-) ).

[whstl]

Same experience.

Super-tight MIDI music sticks out like a sore thumb when you mix it with things performed by humans.

[pbronez]

He actually partnered with an agency and released a virtual marble machine as an app and VST

[cpach]

I think it was more like a music box