Buddha Machines: The little music box that could

Mike Newmark Assistant Arts Editor

Simplicity and innovation are never easily married (just ask BMW’s iDrive designers), but the latest successful marriage is a little plastic music box from China. In late 2005, FM3 (the duo of Christiaan Virant and Zhang Jian) unveiled the Buddha Machine, an iPod-sized audio playback device that contains nine different ambient loops built into its silicon chip. As long as you can power it with two AA batteries or a DC adaptor, the Machine will play each loop—ranging from two to 42 seconds—in an endless cycle. It comes in six different colors (mine’s pink) and has a built-in speaker, a switch to toggle between loops, a volume knob, a DC jack and a headphone jack. In an impossibly short time, this bizarre little creature has enjoyed uniformly excellent press and is becoming a small sensation around the world

The Buddha Machine is both an innovation and a regression. With its toy-like, brightly colored exterior, plastic switches and circular external speaker, the Machine looks very much like a bargain-basement AM radio. The sound quality approaches the lowest of lo-fi; at soft volumes there is a detectable hiss, becoming a guttural reverberation when cranked louder. This is delicate, organic music that seems to decay before your ears, as though you are listening to a naturally occurring source of music centuries before the gramophone. Its design flies in the face of the new MP3 age and displays a winsome affection for times past.

By the same token, this is one forward-looking gizmo. Like the seminal sound-art recordings Matrix and I Am Sitting In A Room (by Ryoji Ikeda and Alvin Lucier, respectively), the Buddha Machine is concerned with the plasticity of sound. The loops’ textures transform from thin and wispy to thick and grainy with a quick turn of the volume knob. More fascinating is how the sound changes as you change the machine’s position. Moving the speaker from one part of the room to another alters the pitch ever-so-slightly and determines which elements of the loop come through the clearest. Placed under your pillow (go ahead, be creative), the sounds become rich and cavernous. Experiencing it through the all-encompassing environment of headphones is a minor miracle.

Of course, the Buddha Machine would be little more than a failed experiment if the music wasn’t strong in its own right. Each of the loops is a work of simple, remarkable beauty (except for the two-second loop, which is too skittish to be effective). They conjure images of the Chinese countryside, with lush, verdant mountains as far as the eye can see, and because the music continues to play until you turn it off (or until the batteries run out), there’s no fade-out or abrupt ending to zap you back to reality. The option of downloading the loops from FM3’s website (fm3.com/cn), throwing them in your iTunes library and hitting the “repeat” button is present, but it vanquishes the actual machine’s appeal as miniature art object and as a nifty little toy.

The Buddha Machine’s basic raison d’etre is that it obliges you to create your own experience. You can simply flip it on and let it run, allowing it to fill the room with sonorous, infinite music as you sleep, meditate or stare at the ceiling. But that’s only part of the story; the Machine’s small size, ergonomically satisfying shape, and array of holes, switches and knobs invite you to interact with it. It can thus be appreciated on several different levels, and rewards both passive and active listeners in distinct ways. It’s hardly a wonder that Brian Eno, one of ambient music’s premier trailblazers, bought eight of them.