This may look like the wooden skeleton of an antiquarian clockwork beast but it’s actually a kinetic sculpture called Thinking Machine from artist Martin Riches and composer Masahiro Miwa. In this ternary machine, steel balls travel down a three-part mechanical track to create sound by hitting the metal pipes situated at the end of the track. The idea behind it is that a computer essentially amounts to a thinking machine based on logical principles, so Riches and Miwa set out to create a “thinking machine” of their own. To construct the sculpture, they created a rotating wheel that could perpetually feed the steel balls onto the wooden tracks, slowly taking them towards the tubular percussion instruments, where a series of wooden mechanical gates designates the balls path in correlation to an algorithm. They then travel back towards the storage wheel on another wooden track and begin their journey anew. The melody produced is both ethereal and haunting and once you watch the video you’ll see that it’s not just the melody that hypnotizes, but also the motion of the machine.

Here’s what they say about it:

The Thinking Machine is a ternary computer that outputs melodies formed by three sounds as resulting from the calculations. Whether binary or ternary, it is a computer in the terms of a Turing machine. In Thinking Machine, the algorithm is fixed as a mechanical mechanism, so it is not a versatile Turing machine or von Neumann type computer. However, like all computers, Thinking Machine is a logical machine that can process code, and is an actual object that expresses discrete time within real time.

This could be seen as an accompanying piece to Martin Riches’ Talking Machine (below) , which he calls an “acoustic speech synthesizer.” It uses 32 pipes to recreate the sounds made by the human mouth, nose, and throat built to the specifics of X-Ray photos of someone talking. The result is more Dalek than human but it’s another interesting piece that hybridizes computers, instruments, machines, and sculpture. You can read an essay by the artist about Talking Machine here.

[via Technabob]