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ShareThis is the Sam Poh Buddhist Temple, located in Malaysia and dedicated to Zheng He, a Chinese admiral:
...and this is a picture of Zendesk’s “Buddha Machine Wall”, based on FM3’s little plastic box known as (predictably) the Buddha Machine:
The second is said to be inspired by the first, though it’s difficult at a glance to see how. The Sam Poh Temple is an ornate, reportedly well-kept structure filled with Chinese artwork, Buddhist statues, and myriad flowers of types atypical to that stretch of Malaysia. The Buddha Machine Wall is a minimalist, almost Warholian webpage consisting entirely of a series of Flash applications.
Zendesk is, apparently, a developer of help desk facilitation software. Beansbox, which actually created the wall under the direction of Zendesk, is a web solutions company. Is any of this making sense yet? The cryptic blog post that Zendesk published announcing the creation of the machine doesn’t really seem to help matters, except perhaps the bit about the “Zen encompass[ing] you”. Maybe that’s it. Maybe the connection is inner peace and stability, as influenced by outside forces. Sure, the connection is kind of tenuous—okay, really tenuous—but if there’s a connection to be made, that’s it.
That said, I was rather taken with the Buddha Machine a few years ago, and still bring it to the office on those occasions when i do need some calm, some music designed specifically for the background. That it never changes or ends unless I ask it to is not only a peaceful feeling, but that the listening experience depends entirely on the listener lends the listener a sense of environmental control. Not to mention, people love the thing—it’s always a source of questions and conversation when it comes to the office.
Despite the odd motivation (or lack thereof) in putting it together, the Buddha machine Wall is nearly as inspired. While the novelty of the artifact disappears in a haze of flash applications, the sense of control is heightened; you still get the satisfaction of controlling when it begins or ends, but you also get the even greater satisfaction of “composing” what it is you’re listening to. Rather than being limited to the nine loops of a single machine, one can instead build a beautiful, layered thing that still sounds like drone. The minor-key chords of the first go wonderfully with the sparse melody of the fifth, the second tends to overpower things if used more than once, and I still haven’t found a use for the ninth. Perhaps your experience with it will be totally different. That’s the beauty.
What’s truly amazing is that after three years, the musical possibilities of a machine that contains less than three minutes of actual unique sound are still being explored in new and fascinating ways. Unlikely as its source may be, the Buddha Machine Wall is at least worth a visit, and maybe even a bookmark.
