An open source 3D printable acoustic violin | Hacker News Reader

An open source 3D printable acoustic violin

hovalin.com

79 pointsjsnathan35 comments

From the FAQ: You may use the hovalin for commercial purposes if you agree to send 10% of your gross revenue from use of the design to HOVA LLC every six months.

It may be open source, but it's not open source as I've ever encountered it before.

(Also, I don't think I've ever heard someone claim that copyright law allows them to demand royalties on the use of a musical instrument. Is a musical performance a derivative work of the instrument design?)

I think that's referring revenue from printing and selling your own copies of the completed violin, rather than from musical performance.

Though you'd think it would be worded more like "you may use the Hovalin design files for commercial purposes...."

Requested them to release the sources, not just the .STL.

Releasing just .STLs is more akin to freeware than open source, as the sources are the project files uses to produce the .STL (which is similar to a compiled binary).

I don't quite understand that analogy. In other to while trying to understand the assembly code that was generated.

STL, on the other hand, is a text file that can be imported for most 3D design tools and hence you can modify it.

Sure you can modify it, but only trivial things like scaling, chopping of a part, and if you are lucky, meshing it with some other part, will be easy.

Say for instance you want to do something simple, like use another sized tuning pegs for this violin. That means changing the diameter (and possibly depth) of the holes they go into. In any reasonable parametric CAD software model (as Fusion 360 enourages), this is merely finding the sub-part that represents the peg or peghole, and entering in a new value for the diameter - every affected area of the model will be updated, correct & still manifold (watertight). With an .STL you will need to find & select all the relevant edges/vertices for each hole, and nudge them around until they (hopefully) fit. This is a trivial example, it becomes more interesting (more painful) if the feature at hand is more complex. Say if there was a trapped nut.

In an STL, all the humanly meaningful parts of why the model is the way it is, how it is built, is gone.

You can dissassemble some executable you get too, and muck around with the code to do modifications - but its hardly how one should do open source.

Exactly - STL is just a storage format of the raw data (vertices, edges, faces).

A .OBJ file would be the same. I'm not entirely sure what others sources may be useful.

I couldn't find the source - only the .stl files

There's a repo on GitHub, but it looks old https://github.com/matthova/hovalin

I can't help it: https://www.xkcd.com/743/

Golden, especially with the .stl discussion in this thread.

That's one of the most unbelievable XKCD references ever.

I went on the comment section purely to see if someone had posted this. Nice one.

You beat me to it...

Is it just me or does it not sound very good? Kind of tinny and not clear and bright? It might just be me.

Nice technical achievement though.

It's not just you. No orchestral professional is going to want this over a wooden instrument. And given that, the pricing is just silly.

It's a good example of bad (naive) modelling. There's a lot more to making a violin (guitar/lute/anything...) than cutting out parts with the right shape and hammering them together.

Choice of wood, glue/joint mechanics, and thickness/composition of the varnish are at least as important.

I suspect it is hard to achieve the acoustics of an instrument traditionnaly made of wood with plastic.

Thinking of it, I don't remember hearing an instrument made out of plastic which sounded nice even though I'm a musician. I'm not saying it cannot be done, it is just not common for now.

Depends how you define "plastic". There are a number of really nice carbon fibre fiddles in the "serious" price range that may give up a teeny-tiny fraction of the absolute best that can be achieved with the best woods, the best varnishes, the best luthiers, the best alignment of the stars and the correct sequence of profanities and vulgarities uttered during the production process, but for that minor loss you get excellent instrument-to-instrument consistency and the ability to play with the same sound under wildly varying conditions of temperature and humidity. Part of the problem with acceptance is that once the price gets high enough, people want "a real one", and Cremona never smelled much like carbon fibre.

Boosey & Hawkes used to make a wonderful series of woodwinds (clarinets and oboes) in aligned glass-fibre-reinforced resin with the same sort of advantages - and disadvantages - with one extra little niggle: they weighed a bloody ton. (I owned a B&H clarinet I haven't picked up in a little over 20 years. There's still a discernible dent in my right thumb, something one never got in a persistent way from wood or the student-oriented plastic or Bakelite instruments. Much nicer sound than anything of wood at twice the price, but I can understand why they didn't sell too very many of them.) I'm sure they could do much better now, at a cost - but then there's the acceptance factor to deal with. At least ebony has problems associated with it that spruce and maple don't so far; it will probably be easier to accept good synthetics over bad or hyper-expensive wood before too much time goes by.

The material used to build an instrument is not very important for the sound, at least for wind instruments. See http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/jom/0708/roncone-0708.html for instance.

Some professional French horn players playing with a mouthpiece on a garden hose : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOpWKgLzxQ4

The only professionaly used plastic instruments I have seen are recorders and flutes. Although no serious recorder/flute player would prefer their sound they can be quite good, especially because they are tuned higher than normal recorders which are tuned way to low. (This is why they sound so bad when playing with other instruments.)

I habe also seen tubists use acrylic mouthpieces.

Jack White famously plays/played a plastic guitar, and got, in my opinion, pretty excellent tones out of it, but (a) you're asking about "acoustics," which don't apply in the same way with an electric guitar, and (b) his tone is/was produced almost entirely by his amps and pedals.

Could it be too expensive?

A good, precise injection mould is many tens of thousands of dollars, and several are probably needed. That's a lot of upfront cost for a low volume product.

Nah, it's just physics really. If you're making an instrument that's traditionally made of wood, and the sound of wood is your cultural reference point, then the plastic/<$SYNTHETIC_MATERIAL> version is not going to sound as good.

It may even sound fine in it's own right, out of context, but it'll almost never be 'the same' as wood. I think that's really the heart of the issue.

EDIT: actually, on the expense issue, these days manufacturing of musical instruments has gotten so good (especially in the east), that the cost of making a 'good' instrument has fallen through the floor. Today we can get perfectly usable (or even very nice) instruments at prices that would make musicians of yesteryear weep.

Those ovation acoustic guitars with the plastic bottoms and carbon fiber tops are pretty good.

Ovation guitars are ridiculously desirable items amongst musicians I know.

At first glance I thought you were saying Ovation made violins and I was going HOLY CRAP WANT :-)

A kazoo comes pretty close

I guess those new plastic trombones and trumpets are pretty good.

Prhaps the alto recorder.

cmon now

edit: now that i see the price... yeah you could say it sounds a little tinny

How does it compare to a cheap $125 violin from Amazon?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFaCpYRMKB8

Short version - not great. Plastic just doesn't make for a very musical sound. If you want an explanation of why, I can go into the physics behind that.

Source: musician of 25ish years.

To me the idea of printing my own violin would be to get a cheap yet decently functional Violin. The price point of $70 is 2x what it needs to be in my opinion. Going on ebay there are entry level violins for $40.

Would be cool to see an open source piano

The fingerboard looks much shorter than on a standard violin. Maybe the materials can't support being cantilevered out over the body like a regular wooden fingerboard? If so, bummer... seems like it would have a pretty adverse effect on range, fingering options, etc.

Is it just that the head is smaller than a typical wooden violin (no scroll etc)?

No, it looks shorter in the other direction (doesn't extend as far over the body). So the string lengths are the same, I think. You just can't finger as high.

Pretty cool achievement. The prices ($300, $450, $600) for the different kinds of kits make this seem like a poor investment if one is just looking for a violin.

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