Not saying all these previous attempts aren't amazing, but I feel like we're barely touching the true potential 3d printing is giving us. I wish to hear musical instruments sounding like nothing we've heard before. And after this research I thought of a few ways of going there.

The woodblocks I made in my own experiments, show how having control of the inner structure of an instrument can lead a lot of control on the final sound. The reason why wood works so good for musical instruments is that it has a hollow internal structure will a lot of tiny resonant spaces (see in the picture above). It has been said that the reason Stradivarius violins sound so good is because the wood used is exceptionally uniform. So imagine what could happen when we have control of this structure. Maybe we can make things that sound even better than what mother nature gave us!

Another direction is in using 3d printing for weird shapes. Amit Zoran made some crazy concepts like the trumpet you see above and at TU delft they made saxophone mouthpieces with internal aerodynamic structures. These concepts use 3d printing's advantage to make parts within parts (within parts, within parts...). Maybe we'll be able to make all sorts of modular instruments this way, where you take part trumpet, part saxophone, and part oboe, and turn it into a crazy custom obumpophone. Maybe we can even go further, and make use of internal moving parts like in this movie:

The last possibility I see is that we will be able to calculate how the instrument sounds before it is even made. As you can see in the video below; computer technology could design the mythological 'major third' bell that bell-makers spend centuries on trying.

Back to 3d prinitng, some flutes were made with calculated properties and sound bowls with the characteristics of someone's blood pressure. Imagine that in the future, you can basically use a synthesizer on your computer to find some crazy sounds you like, and then you press print to get an instrument which will actually make that sound!

Like this article explains, 3d printed shapes seem to follow the history of synthesized sound. I think that 3d printing will not stop at reproducing parts and forms we already know, it will open a whole new world of unimaginable shapes and mechanisms, just like we could never have imagined synthesizer sounds 100 years ago.

What do you think is the future?

Thanks Marie Caye for the help on this project!