Can You Play the Fipple? Now Design Any Musical Wind Instrument with Printone

This is a star (3 holes; 6 tones) ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’

Through Printone, users can make a wind instrument out of any shape and are able to select the target notes that they want the instrument to have. After the user inputs a three-dimensional shape into the platform, the tool creates a hollow acoustic cavity. The user then selects the area where they will blow into the instrument easily (known as “the fipple”) and chooses the position and size of finger holes. The scale of the object can also be changed to hit the target range of notes. During this process, users are guided by quick feedback from the simulation on how each edit shifts the notes produced. Alternatively, users can utilize Printone’s AutoTune feature, which produces hole sizes automatically for the target notes desired for the instrument.

“3-D printing has opened up possibilities for personal customization in manufacturing. Our research shows how it’s possible to customize shapes not just for their appearance, but also for physical behavior like acoustics. We’re also excited about the creative opportunities to design an instrument for a specific piece of music. Future work could expand into ergonomics so that the instrument’s finger configurations are easier to play for a particular melody,” says study co-author, Emily Whiting, assistant professor of computer science at Dartmouth College, who is also a flutist of over 20 years.

 

This is a snowman. Snowman (3 holes; 5 tones) ‘Jingle Bells.’

From a computing methodology standpoint, the Printone interface narrows the computational scope of the tool, which could be otherwise daunting, by modeling the instrument as a passive resonator in which the oscillation from the mouthpiece is excluded, and focuses on the dominant tone to predict frequency resonance, rather than considering the entire frequency spectrum.

Through its computational acoustic simulation and interactive feedback, Printone allows for the creation of hobby-grade wind instruments in unique 3-D forms, which can then be printed on commonly available 3-D printers.