Cubism
This is a 3D printer:
It’s frickin’ awesome. It builds up layers of polymer into an honest-to-god pokable structure. And I want to use it to make a musical instrument.
I thought of this after yesterday’s daydreaming-about-metalworking post, realizing that I probably am not likely to a) get a metalworking shop into our rental apartment without some serious landlord hassles; or b) acquire the necessary expertise to squish a tuba into a cube (A CUBA! Hell yes!) without squishing its tubes totally shut. I’d probably just kinda whack a bit of copper pipe with a hammer and then get all mopey when it doesn’t even let any air through, let alone make noise.
However, G. already has mad autocad and 3d printing skillz (architects have ALL the fun) which combined with my slightly less useful — but more geeky — experimental physics, could totally result in the realization of all my Platonic-solid instrument dreams. Or at least a really, really weird looking kazoo.
Now there is just the tiny problem of, errr, getting our hands on a 3D printer.
Lituus Play
A graduate student (Who seems to actually accomplish things. Bastard.) recently helped to re-introduce an extinct, and ridiculously unwieldy instrument back into the wild. The impractical device in question is called the Lituus, and it’s a basically a really long horn. Over 8ft long, in fact (that’s two-and-a-half-ish meters, metric folk). Can you imagine trying to pack that baby up at the end of a concert? Yeah. That’s probably why no-one has been using it for the last 300 years.
Despite not having a drawing of what the thing looked like, or even a proper ye olde description of it, the researchers used vague hints about it’s shape and tonal range to come up with a design using witchcraft and/or simulation software. And it works. They even played BWV 118 with two of the little beasts this year. No YouTube video yet. There is a short clip of it over on the BBC website, though.
I’m curious about the software they used to design this thing. I wonder if instead of optimizing it to be a simple straight line, they can make it really, really complicated instead. Like with TONNES of twisting and spiraling and turns and crap. Maybe you could fold it into a sphere, or a cube. You could have a whole set of platonic solid shaped horns.
Reason number 5,183 why I want a metal-working shop in my garage.