Printed Violin

[Enthalpy]

Hear a violin 3D-printed of polymer:

http://3dprintedinstruments.wikidot.com ... nstruments
hosted on

it could have sounded worse. But it's very far from a decent violin.

Printing a violin or a woodwind's reed is the most difficult challenge and I don't imagine plastic to succeed in that task, especially if the shape is just copied from the wooden parts, which is meant for very different material properties.

But for instrument parts that don't essentially vibrate, like the body of a recorder or the mouthpiece of a woodwind, we're on the verge of home-printing them.

Which I feel ironic, because chip-making manufacturing processes are obviously cheaper than 3D printing for them. A woodwind mouthpiece is only a part of hard rubber, it has a simple shape except for the reed seat which is just copied automatically by the grinding machine from a pattern. So cheaper home printing just results from the many profits in the sales chain.

[John Cuthber]

Is the definition of "a decent violin" anything other than circular?

How should it sound? Is it just a matter of what you are used to?

[Enthalpy]

I'd find a disk more decent than a circle.

 

This printed violin has objective weaknesses, it's not just a matter of habit. The sound starts slowly and attacks are difficult to play. The strength of nearby notes is uneven. The highest notes are weak.

 

This good violonist could adapt to this particular instrument and cope with its weaknesses to hide them more or less. The piece isn't chosen neither to make the weaknesses apparent. In an other context, the printed violin would show its defects more clearly.

 

It's like a computer screen: at the shop, it displays a nice coloured slowly moving image, and there every screen looks good. But to test it, you must display a uniform steady grey or black, or a sudden change, or sharp contrasts, and then you see the weaknesses - which you would later notice on less artificial pictures too.

[StringJunky]

I'd find a disk more decent than a circle.

 

This printed violin has objective weaknesses, it's not just a matter of habit. The sound starts slowly and attacks are difficult to play. The strength of nearby notes is uneven. The highest notes are weak.

 

This good violonist could adapt to this particular instrument and cope with its weaknesses to hide them more or less. The piece isn't chosen neither to make the weaknesses apparent. In an other context, the printed violin would show its defects more clearly.

 

It's like a computer screen: at the shop, it displays a nice coloured slowly moving image, and there every screen looks good. But to test it, you must display a uniform steady grey or black, or a sudden change, or sharp contrasts, and then you see the weaknesses - which you would later notice on less artificial pictures too.

But like any instrument, each individual one has strengths and weaknesses. An artist will explore its capabilities and perform within them.

[Enthalpy]

I don't hear any strength in this instrument. But blatant weaknesses, a lot.

This violonist could conceal more or less the instrument's inability to produce clear attacks, but she will never want to play such a horror. It's unusable.

 

Whether a decent violin can be produced of thermoplastics, I doubt it. The very first step would be to adapt the design to the material, not reproduce the shape of a wooden instrument. But flexural waves are so much slower in thermoplastics than in light wood that the task is probably impossible. Integral stiffeners would improve only the lowest modes.

 

Graphite fibres are a better candidate for the speed of flexural waves, especially as a sandwich. Then, with proper damping and a redesign of the instrument, maybe perhaps.

 

By the way, violin design and craft shouldn't be understood as hideout of conservatism. Many makers experiment, not few of them are excellent on acoustics, sometimes academics (try to) add their knowledge. Aluminium and copper alloys have been tried, graphite too, other shapes as well, so one shouldn't expect success with an attempt as elementary as reproducing the shape out of plastic. The very first difficulty is that light wood has objective and quantifyable physical advantages, the second is that the violin's shape has been optimized over a pair of centuries, far from being a frozen tradition.