By David Templeton | From the November-December 2024 issue of Strings Magazine
In January of 2023, on the popular radio program Science Friday, host Ira Flatow listened as Dr. Mary-Elizabeth Brown—a concert violinist and the founder and director of the AVIVA Young Artists Program in Montreal, Quebec—played Méditation, from the opera Thaïs, by Jules Massenet. She played the piece twice: once on the 1766 Giuseppe Gagliano she performs on professionally, and once on a two-piece plastic violin she snapped together after feeding the design specs into a 3D printer. Brown’s challenge to Flatow, one she has made numerous times to various radio hosts over the last couple of years, was to identify the Gagliano based only on its sound.
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“Oh, my goodness! I have no idea!” Flatow said when she ended the second performance. “They are so close. The sound is excellent.” Encouraged to go ahead and make a guess, Flatow picked the first performance as the Gagliano, making it clear that, for him, it was basically a coin-flip situation. As it turned out, he was correct. “You’re the first person who’s been able to guess that one right,” Brown said, pointing out that, all fun aside, fooling talk show hosts was not why she had been touting the quality of plastic violins. Brown is a longtime music educator, thus it will come as no surprise that her goals were all about the kids.
“I’m very fortunate that I have been able to play on this very fine Italian instrument for quite a long time, and it’s a real joy to play on,” she said. “But a beginning violinist doesn’t need that.”
And that’s where the plastic instrument comes in.
For the last six years or so, Brown has been working with a team of designers and musicians to create child-size 3D-printed violins so affordable that any student with an interest in music will have the opportunity to learn to play on their own instrument. And if a kid decides the violin is not for them, their 3D-printed model is fully recyclable.
“We are still waiting on patent approval,” Brown says, speaking from her home in Montreal about a year and a half after the Science Friday interview. “We have some good stuff, but nothing is for sale yet. My hope is that we’ll begin serious beta testing by the end of this year.”
With the costs of living going up in so many places, forcing parents to make difficult decisions about how to spend their family’s income, the opportunities made possible by good, durable, inexpensive musical instruments for kids are genuinely exciting. “If ever there were a time to do this, to make affordable violins for music students, it’s now,” Brown says. “For us, the goal of this project is not to make money. It’s to put a violin into the hands of any child who wants one. It’s about making something that is widely accessible, giving you something you can download and then take to the maker space in your library, and for between $3 and $7, go home with a good-sounding, playable instrument.”
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They do have their quirks, Brown admits, but also their benefits. She generally needs to use a little more bow speed on the 3D-printed violin than on a traditional instrument. On the other hand, they are made from a plastic polymer, making them, if not exactly indestructible, at least highly durable. Along with their low cost, this makes a printed violin far less stressful for parents, especially compared to the wooden instrument they would otherwise need to buy, rent, or lease.
“It makes the idea of kids playing the violin so much more approachable,” Brown says. “I mean, how often do we hear parents say, ‘Be careful! Be careful. Don’t drop your violin!’ The 3D-printed version is still a fragile thing, to a degree. You wouldn’t want to play football with it or anything. But it’s plastic. That gives us an opportunity to undo some of those fear factors.”
Another advantage is how easy it is to design useful modifications to the 3D-printed violin, depending on who will be playing it. “For example,” Brown says, “we are able to print a violin that has little notches on the fingerboard, so kids who are visually impaired can feel where their fingers go.”
Though not yet widely available, Brown has been using 3D-printed violins with her own students for years. In addition to their affordability, another appealing feature is that you can print these violins in an array of attractive colors. For many kids, that can make all the difference. “I had a young person in my studio jump up and say, ‘If you print me a blue violin, I think I’ll play my scales more,’” Brown says.
Using technology to print 3D violins isn’t exactly new, of course. Since the mid-1980s, when early 3D printers cost around $300,000, musical instruments—or specific individual parts of them—have been among the many applications attempted by those experimenting with computerized 3D printing. As the technology has improved and costs have come down, access to 3D printing has expanded to the point where schools, libraries, community maker spaces, and many individual artists and small manufacturers can afford them. Today, a decent entry-level 3D printer can be had for $200. Such technologies are now used in a wide range of fields, including aerospace, automotive manufacturing, robotics, and medicine—where everything from 3D-printed dental crowns and prosthetic eyes to portal veins to artificial vertebrae have been successfully employed.
Naturally, a number of enterprising people have experimented with making 3D-printed violins and many other types of musical instruments. Since 2013, mechanical engineer David Perry of Portland, Oregon, has been developing various designs for 3D-printed electric and acoustic violins. He develops the instruments through OpenFab PDX, his digital design and manufacturing consulting firm. They come in odd but appealing shapes and colors and are offered as fully built instruments, assemble-it-yourself kits, or as open software so you can print them yourself.
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In 2019, Hova Labs—a San Francisco Bay Area software and design company co-founded by Matt and Kaitlyn Hova—won the Best in 3D Printing Award at DeveloperWeek, an annual gathering of developers, engineers, software architects, and executives from around the world. The project that won the award for the Hovas was their Hovalin, an open source, 3D-printable acoustic violin.
Most of the above-mentioned instruments fall into the “affordable” category, ranging between $75 to around $600. And that’s just the tip of the 3D-printed iceberg.
As the music world gradually comes to recognize the educational utility of 3D-printed violins as starter instruments, there are those who are making the case that with the right designer, printed violins can also be genuine pieces of art and advanced engineering. Bucking the assumption that a 3D-printed violin is simply a cheap alternative to a “real” instrument, there are those who are manufacturing 3D-printed violins that cost thousands of dollars—and are worth every penny.
“3D printing is simply one manufacturing technique among many,” says Laurent Bernadac, founder of 3DVarius, which designs and manufactures striking high-end electric violins. What began with a Kickstarter campaign in 2015 has evolved to a company, based in France, offering a whole line of transparent (as in see-through) 3D-printed violins, based on a Stradivari model in dimensions, but more closely resembling something from a science fiction film. “We only use 3D printing for its unique qualities, design complexity, and transparency,” Bernadac explains, alluding to the expectation that anything made with this technology will look and be inexpensive. “Indeed, novices are often astonished by the price of our instruments compared to consumer 3D models. But after a few explanations of our overall manufacturing process and the type of high-end machines we use, things become clearer.”
3DVarius currently produces four different models: the 3Dvarius, the Line, the Prism, and the Equinox. “Each of our 3Dvarius [violins] is unique, so we put a lot of work into each of our instruments,” Bernadac says, adding that each instrument requires 24 hours of 3D printing and 20 days of hand processing. “We have all types of customers, from amateurs to professionals. But the vast majority of our violinists also have a classical violin at home, which they keep for traditional music. Our instruments are primarily designed for contemporary and amplified music—jazz, rock, country, etc.”
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Bernadac says that in creating each instrument, the company’s first priority is quality of sound, followed by playing comfort and aesthetics, with cost being the lowest priority. Though “3D” is right there in the company’s name, Bernadac suggests that the process of production doesn’t really matter. “Just the final result is important,” he says. “We only use 3D printing in areas where it is superior to other manufacturing methods.”
This emphasis on results is clearly important, even in lower-end instruments. “I premiered a concerto with a symphony orchestra playing a 3D-printed violin,” notes Brown, referencing the same kind of instruments she’s working to make available for students. “You can play these at a very high level.”
That said, Brown stresses that her aim is not now, and never has been, to replace fine Italian instruments. “It’s not about putting 3D-printed instruments in the New York Philharmonic or anything of that nature,” she says. “The goal has always been one of accessibility, of putting something into the hands of a young person that will allow them to explore making music on a violin and to make that possible for any child that can come up with the money to get a file and head to their library’s maker space.”
For Brown, her most important message is one of access and availability. “This is the story of challenging norms,” she says, “so as we go further into the 21st century, music is not about cost and privilege. It becomes something that is available to anyone who wants to make it.”
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