I, me and Martin
This post was originally written in Italian and translated using AI. If you notice any translation errors or unclear passages, please let me know.
Martin is a Swedish musician, one of those who enjoys experimenting with electronic music. His passion for music has led him, over the years, to develop musical instruments endowed with a soul. Gears, electric motors, and wooden structures that compose innovative works of art, perfectly matching the genre being played.
After developing Music Box, a peculiar music box powered by punched paper tapes, and Modulin, a synthesizer-violin, Martin devoted himself to the great project of his life: the Marble Machine. Not a single instrument, but a complex mechanical system capable of synchronously playing a xylophone, a drum kit, and a bass. Years of intense work followed for Martin and, in 2016, he published on YouTube a demonstration video of how his new creation worked. At the time I’m writing this, the video has nearly 215 million views!
Martin’s goal is to take the Marble Machine on tour with his band Wintergatan, but the machine is not yet ready to perform. There are mechanical problems, marbles bouncing everywhere, and an inherent difficulty in programming the melody. So, in 2017, he decided to start the Marble Machine X project, aiming to fix the issues and give the musical artwork industrial-level precision. Martin began publishing videos regularly, sharing with his community the various phases of the project. Tens of thousands of CAD-designed parts, made by cutting wood, steel, and plastic.
By 2020, the construction of the Marble Machine X had become an extremely modular, yet equally complex, project. In the videos, Martin repeatedly tried to break the record for marbles played without jamming the mechanism or dropping any to the ground. And yet, something wasn’t working in the overall project. Much had improved since 2016, but synchronization issues between instruments still remained.
In 2021, Martin released a video in which he decided to halt the design of the Marble Machine X. With exquisite honesty, he explained that the project could not continue through incremental approximations or endless redesigns of individual modules. The time had come to stop and reflect on the future.
And it is in one of his videos that Martin presented two books that helped him focus on his goals, reducing everything around him to the bare minimum: Deep Work by Cal Newport and Essentialism by Greg McKeown. 2021 was a sabbatical year, after which he announced in 2022 his return with a new project: the Marble Machine 3. The novelty? A reversal of priorities in the design process: not building a machine containing the instruments, but building the instruments with a machine around them.
Leaving Martin to his future now, wishing him all the best for his new project, let’s turn to me for a moment.
I was deeply struck by Martin’s first video and started following him both for my passion for music and my interest in that intense tangle of gears composing his instruments. The 2021 video arrived at a particular moment in my professional life, so I immediately decided to buy Deep Work. In his book, Cal Newport addresses one of the critical issues for every knowledge employee, or as he himself calls them, knowledge workers: the pursuit of focus. A real manual on how to deal with commitments, distractions, and, in general, time management at work.
A reading as pleasant as it was interesting, one that I needed to fix in my mind somehow. That’s why I wrote a series of articles that go through and re-elaborate on the techniques described in the book, in the style of shared notes. If you too, like me and Martin, are interested in improving your time management and concentration, then dive into the reading: