3D Printing a Glockenspiel | Two Minute Papers #17

Key Takeaways

dear fellow Scholars this is 2minute papers with car here a glocken Spiel is a percussion instrument that consists of small pieces of metal that are tuned to emit a given musical note when they are struck in order to achieve these sounds this instrument is usually manufactured as a set of metal bars researchers at Harvard Columbia University and MIT became interested in designing a computer algorithm to obtain different shapes that lead to the same sounds and if it's possible that one should be able to Mill or 3D print these shapes and see whether the computation results are in line with reality the algorithm takes an input material a Target shape and a location where we'd like to strike it and the frequency spectrum that describes the characteristics of the sound we are looking for furthermore the algorithm also has to optimize how exactly the stand of the piece looks like to make sure that no valuable frequencies are dampened here's an example to show how impactful the design of this stand is and how beautiful sustained the sound is if it is well optimized you'll see a set of input shapes specified by the user that are tuned to standard musical notes and Below them the optimized shapes that are as similar as possible but with the constraint of emitting the correct sound the question is how should the technique change your target shape to match the sound that you specified [Music] one can also specify what overtones the sound should have an overtone means that besides the fundamental tone that we play for instance on a guitar higher frequency sounds are also emitted producing a richer and more harmonious sound in this example the metal piece will emit higher octaves of the same note if you have a key near for music you will hear and appreciate the difference in the Sounds in summary with this technique one can inexpensively create awesome custommade glocken SPS that have a comparable sound quality to professionally manufactured instruments staggering results it seems that we are starting to appear in the news it is really cool to see that there's a hunger for knowing more about science and research if you like this episode please help us reaching more and more people and share the series with your friends especially with people who have nothing to do with science thanks so much for watching and I'll see you next [Music] time