Tunable Harp

Another topic we explored in IXL were the acoustics of 3D printed instruments printed on the HP Multi Jet Fusion 3D printer. This particular instrument is a tunable harp. It is an iteration on a previous harp whose strings were not detachable nor tunable. If a string broke, the instrument was rendered useless. We are also collaborating with CCRMA (Stanford Center for Computational Research in Musical Acoustics) to characterize the acoustic properties of 3D printed instruments, starting with simple 3D printed drums and “xylophone” bars. A composition I made which employs all the 3D printed instruments we made can be found here.

Why it matters: Consistency in 3D printing is very important. We ran experiments to see how the printing angle, and the placement of the instrument in the Multi Jet Fusion powder bed would affect the sound. In this particular experiment, the goal was to see if we could create the correct pitches for the strings and allow them to be tuned post printing.

Contributions: Ideation, experimentation, design of harp and mechanism.

Team: For tunable harp: Eric Faggin. For the 3D printed instruments: Eric Faggin, Mary Baker, Alex Ju, JiWon Jun. For acoustics research at CCRMA: Eric Faggin, Mary Baker, Doga Cavdir, Mark Rau, Romain Michon.