This video has been circling the internet viral scene for a while now. Emails are sent describing that "such and such engineering firm," with some no-name engineers, collaborated with "such and such music conservatory," and obtained materials as well as financing from large corporations. The project these fictitious geniuses collaborated on was to make a music generating "machine." The machine would have the constructs of musical instruments, but each note would be "played" by a cannon that shot out a series of hard-shelled balls at each instrument. The timing of the ball deployment is, in theory, mathematically calculated to match up to the score from the played song's sheet music. Since music is an applied mathematics, the patterns for shooting the balls to play the notes can be coordinated with the notes of the song.

The product is an amazing display of mathematical and engineering theory. Although this video is CGI, it is still pretty entertaining to watch and even more impressive to imagine if it were real.

Could something like this actually be created? Possibly, or at least in theory it could.