Take a bow: 3D printing makes violins for everyone
Technology and art are blending to make high-quality violins much more affordable – and in any colour. Nicole Kobie reveals why the future of music is plastic
Top-quality violins are expensive – a Stradivarius can cost millions of dollars. At the other end of the spectrum are cheap beginner “violin-shaped objects”, so-called because while they look like the instrument, they don’t sound quite right. Yet those are the instruments that many students are handed, making learning an already challenging skill that much more difficult – if they can even afford those.
Back in 2017, concert violinist and educator Mary-Elizabeth Brown was considering how to get better instruments into the hands of her students and wondered if violins could be 3D printed. The short answer: they absolutely can. But it took some time getting there, and more work is required.
“It’s a game changer,” Brown told PC Pro. “I’ve heard from many orchestra teachers in under-served communities saying their kids have to provide their own instruments, but they can’t afford to. My aim is to help them out as soon as we can.”
Brown isn’t the only one 3D-printing violins. Makers can download the designs for the Hovalin, an open-source printable violin, and an electric violin was crowdfunded on Kickstarter in 2015. More recently, startup 3D Music showcased its plastic violins at the 2023 CES tech show in Las Vegas. Co-founder Ben Kaufman says the idea was to make more durable instruments at a lower cost. “We noticed that kids kept breaking them,” he said. “So we started 3D Music as a challenge: is this possible? And we quickly discovered that yes, it is – and it actually sounds pretty good.”
Music from plastic
Beyond winning awards as a musician, Brown is the founder and director of the AVIVA Virtual Young Artist Program, which teaches music online. It was set up in 2012, well before the pandemic, highlighting her penchant for using technology to teach art.
In 2017, Brown and her team got a grant from the Canadian government and began development, though the funding for the work later shifted to her own programme. They started by scanning a violin, simply with the aim of figuring out how to print a full-size instrument; the final print took 66 hours at an industrial lab. Of course, that merely gave the team a model of a violin, not a playable instrument.
“As long as you don’t drop it on concrete, they’ll usually survive their first fall okay… We’ve had one get hit by a car”
To translate that plastic “violinshaped object” into an instrument, Brown and her colleagues analysed their favourite violins, nicking the best bits – in particular, they took the measurements of the “Betts” Stradivarius made in 1704, widely considered one of the finest violins ever made. “The first thing we did was take a basic violin shape, and then went through all the instruments that created sounds that we really loved,” she said. “That has to do with the material, but also with the acoustics and the shape of the instrument.”
They then tweaked the design, using physics to inform and evolve their computer model. For example, they expanded the belly of the instrument to give more space for sound to resonate and altered the thickness of the walls in places for better acoustics.
They also trialled different materials. The commonly used acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) apparently sounds a bit “like a tin can” but is used for the fingerboard, though polylactic acid filaments (PLA) work surprisingly well. The latest candidate is Silk PLA, which includes additives to make it softer and shinier, but Brown says that has led to a mess of “spaghetti” – a reference to failed prints that look like a jumble of noodles – in her 3D printer.
As wood is porous and plastic isn’t, the PLA is printed in a mesh pattern of small squares, based on acoustic research as well as trial and error. “That square-shaped pattern is the most acoustically favourable,” said Brown. “It took a fair bit to settle on the shape – square-shaped stuff sounds much better than star-shaped or hexagon.”
Surprising improvements
In some ways, plastic works better than wood. The violins are lighter and more robust than traditional instruments, making them ideal for young students. And there have been other pleasant surprises, Brown says. The 3D-printed instruments use standard string and chin rests – a design decision to ensure anyone could use them without specialist materials – but two key pieces that are normally extra components were printed integrally.
On the top of a violin is the bridge, and inside a violin is something called a soundpost; Brown describes it as a stick held in place by tension and requiring maintenance.
“The idea was to print in the bridge and the soundpost. We didn’t think it would work and it did and it’s been the most wonderful surprise,” she said. “If the end goal is to put these instruments in the hands of people who might not be able to afford instruments, saddling them with [the] costs of continual maintenance is just not a gift.”
Intriguingly, 3D Music’s model also involves tweaks to the soundposts. The startup’s design included extra posts to better support the rest of the instrument’s weight. “Plastic is not as strong as wood,” Kaufman explained. “The compressive load has been transferred a little bit better and we use the violin’s body itself, the front and the back, as a ring to support the weight of the bridge. Because when it’s in tension, it’s giving 60lb of pressure or more.”
Plastic may not be as strong as wood when faced with the tension of tightly strung strings, but it’s more robust in other ways – notably when children drop them on the ground. “As long as you don’t drop it on concrete, they’ll usually survive their first fall okay,” said Kaufman. “We’ve had a quartersized one go out a third-storey window, we’ve had one get hit by a car, and one go down a flight of stairs. They’re more durable than a wooden one – they’re not as solid... so they bend and flex rather than snap or crack.”
Playing plastic
But how does it sound? Brown offers a demo, leading to a truly lovely Zoom moment. She has two instruments in her office, a traditional violin and a 3D-printed model she helped develop. She picks up the latter, a sharplooking black and white design, lines it up under her chin and plays a bit of Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons”, before flipping through a handful of other classical pieces in a quick medley. “How did that sound?” she asked. Utterly fabulous, but it’s not often one gets an impromptu personal performance by a concert violinist.
For comparison, she picks up the other instrument, a 1766 Gagliano, her concert violin. “It’s a fine instrument – we’re in the six figures for these in British pounds,” she said, before playing “Four Seasons” again, and the sound is incomparable to what came before – rich, luxurious, magical. “You can hear... a different colour of sound – it’s different for sure, but is it half a million dollars different?”
Brown admits it’s an unfair test – her instrument costs hundreds of thousands of pounds, while the plastic violin is less than $20 in plastic and components, though that doesn’t include the cost to access a machine or develop the designs. “What would probably be a better sort of side by side is a beginner outfit,” she said. “The ones that are a funny orange colour that arrive in a box.”
3D Music, meanwhile, charges
$350 for a full-size violin, and as little as $225 for its quarter-size model designed for younger students. “Is that cheaper than the ones on Amazon? No, not at all,” Kaufman said. “But [students’]
“The violins can in theory be printed by anyone. And that’s the next step: getting these instruments into the hands of students”
current instruments are between $400 and $800, and we don’t have anything in our product lineup over $350.”
How do they sound next to a traditional violin? About 10% quieter, for a start, says Kaufman. That means 3D Music’s model might not work for a concert but is perfect for practising.
3D Music’s violins have another trick: they make beginner students sound less terrible. “These were specifically designed for people learning the violin, so we also suppress sounds,” he said. “When you’re learning, you’ll make it squeak. Our violins eat these sounds.” Kaufman explains that his co-founder Matt Canel – who is a cellist – tweaked the design to remove the worst such noises. “If you’re playing wrong, it still doesn’t sound great,” Kaufman added. “It just doesn’t squeak.”
What’s next?
Brown hopes the violins will be ready for students this year, but there are a few last hurdles to leap. First, the team is working on minimising support structures, which are printed in plastic to help hold up the final product, experimenting with the angle the violin is printed at to reduce them and ensure they’re easily removed. Another challenge is balancing the amount of plastic used and ensuing cost with the resulting sound and sturdiness.
Brown is also trying to choose a tuner. “Anybody who plays the violin will tell you that tuning one is notoriously difficult – this is a really low-tech instrument,” she said, pointing to the top of her elegant Gagliano and explaining that its tuner is just pegs of ebony wood wedged in. “There’s no gear, there’s no anything, there’s just friction.” Her desk is covered in different screws, bolts and pegs – even a ukulele tuner – trying to find a simpler plug-and-play solution.
Once such decisions are finalised, the violins can in theory be printed by anyone. And that’s the next step: getting these instruments into the hands of students who want them. Brown has heard from members of the 3D-printing community as far afield as small American towns and Australian suburbs offering to manufacture the violins, which can be made on home printers, so long as they’re large enough to fit the body.
In the future, Brown says it will be possible to make violins more accessible to more would-be musicians, perhaps making lighter instruments or ones that have printed in markers for blind players. “My first order of business is to get these into as many hands as possible,” she said. “And then to look next at how we can best leverage technology to make arts education available to anybody.”
While traditionalists may prefer the elegant look of a classic Stradivarius, younger students like being able to personalise their colours – one student told Brown she’d practise her scales more if she had a blue instrument, while
Kaufman sent photos of a sparkly purple violin and was printing a rainbow glitter model.
Such projects highlight the crossover between art and technology, an idea that is sometimes embraced – such as with NFTs and AI creation – but often seen in opposition. “Sometimes we forget that innovation crosses boundaries... I think this helps dispel this idea that there are techie people and there are artsy people and the two don’t mix – we do,” said Brown. “You can do both. You can be both.”