MARY-ELIZABETH BROWN: I live my life in this wonderful sea of beautiful music. It is a wonderful opportunity for young people to learn everything from focus and discipline to setting and hitting goals, to working well with other people as we play together in the orchestra. So if I can, in some way, help more young people to come to that, I think that would be a wonderful thing.

D PETERSCHMIDT: Hi. Welcome to Universe of Art, a podcast from Science Friday and WNYC Studios about artists who use science to take their work to the next level. I'm Science Friday producer D Peterschmidt. If you were ever in school band or were the parent of a kid in those programs, you know that those instruments aren't cheap. The school might have some spare instruments in storage that students can start learning on.

But if you plan on playing and learning that instrument long-term, they can get pricey, starting in the hundreds of dollars and easily running into the thousands for something of quality that can last you years and years. And if it's a stringed instrument, it's likely that you'll mostly be playing classical music where price is only one of several huge barriers that helps make the genre largely inaccessible.

But the subject of today's episode wants to help tackle those accessibility problems using 3D printing. Mary-Elizabeth Brown is a concert violinist and founder and director of the AVIVA Young Artists Program, who's using her knowledge of violins to develop a 3D print of one that has the sound of a Stradivarius, but only costs $7 to produce. She aims to make them mostly for kids getting into music. Before we get to that, I'm here with the producer of this segment, Rasha Aridi. Hey, Rasha.

RASHA ARIDI: Hey, D.

D PETERSCHMIDT: So did you ever play in a middle or a high school band?

RASHA ARIDI: I have never touched an instrument before in my life, actually.

D PETERSCHMIDT: Oh, really?

RASHA ARIDI: I wanted to play the drums as a kid, and my mom was like, no, too loud for this house.

D PETERSCHMIDT: Oh, no. Drums are so cool, though.

RASHA ARIDI: I know. Maybe one day.

D PETERSCHMIDT: And yeah, how did you come across this story?

RASHA ARIDI: Yeah, so I came across this story, it was an article about this woman, this professional violinist who could 3D print this violin for kids for only a few bucks. And I was reading the story, and I was like, you know what? I really want to hear this story. So as a radio producer and like audio nerd, I thought I could bring some new life into this amazing story and shed some light on the work that the violinist Mary-Elizabeth Brown is doing. And so I made it into a radio story.

D PETERSCHMIDT: [LAUGHS] It's nice when that happens.

RASHA ARIDI: I know, great.

D PETERSCHMIDT: So Mary-Elizabeth actually plays both violins during the interview. She has her like legit, kind of classical, made of wood violin. And then she has like the $7 3D-printed violin. And she plays the same piece back to back so you can hear the difference, but it's really, really, really hard to hear a difference. Was that fun setting up beforehand? It's like, hey, can you play some violin during the segment?

RASHA ARIDI: It was so fun. And I couldn't produce this segment without playing that game, you know? Like, we had to do a side-by-side comparison. I wanted to see if we could trip people up because I was wrong in guessing. And I'll let audiences figure it out for themselves later. But she played on this plastic violin, basically-- and it's all white and kind of looks like a toy, almost-- and then also with her beautiful Italian violin from like the 1700s, this stunning, gorgeous instrument. But when you heard it through the radio, I mean, I know nothing about music, and I couldn't figure it out. But she's also stumped some other musicians as well.

D PETERSCHMIDT: Hm, yeah. So last question, the beauty of 3D printing of violin is that you can print it in any color you want. So I know you haven't touched an instrument before. You don't play music. But if you were getting a 3D-printed violin made for you, what color would you want it to be?

RASHA ARIDI: Ooh, oh, my gosh. That's such a good question. Maybe black, like solid black. Make a statement with it, you know. Have a little emo moment going on there. I think it'd look really cool. [LAUGHS]

D PETERSCHMIDT: You bring it in to a Hot Topic, and you're like, what? I need something to go with this when I'm performing onstage.

RASHA ARIDI: Yes, exactly, like a neon pink bow or something ridiculous to match.

D PETERSCHMIDT: Yeah, oh, my God. That'd be so cool.

RASHA ARIDI: Living my middle school dream.

D PETERSCHMIDT: Yeah, exactly. Well, thanks, Rasha. I can't wait to listen to this. Let's tune in.

RASHA ARIDI: Thanks. You enjoy the segment.

D PETERSCHMIDT: And now here is Science Friday host Ira Flatow talking with concert violinist, Mary-Elizabeth Brown.

[VIOLIN PLAYING]

IRA FLATOW: Stringed instruments can be a joy to the ears and the eyes, handcrafted, made of beautiful wood. And the very best ones are centuries old and worth hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions, of dollars.

[VIOLIN PLAYING]

Except for that violin you just heard. What if I told you, it cost just a few bucks, and it's made of plastic? Now, why would you want a plastic violin? As I said, violins can get really expensive, and even the beginner ones might cost you a couple of grand. And that hefty price tag makes them inaccessible for a lot of families and classrooms. But my next guest has a plan to get more violins into children's hands by 3D printing them. Yes, Dr. Mary-Elizabeth Brown is a concert violinist and the founder and director of the AVIVA Young Artists Program based in Montreal, Quebec. Welcome to Science Friday.

MARY-ELIZABETH BROWN: Thanks so much for having me.

IRA FLATOW: Nice to have you. How a violin sounds all comes down to physics, right?

MARY-ELIZABETH BROWN: It does. It's all about how acoustics function and how those sound waves transfer and play in the resonating body of the instrument.

IRA FLATOW: And you translated that science into an instrument that can be 3D-printed. Please, walk me through the process here.

MARY-ELIZABETH BROWN: We are now about five years into this story. We started by asking this question about five years ago, well, if you can print a bone or a portal vein, why can't we print a violin? And so I started working with an interdisciplinary team based in Ottawa. We developed instruments for use in the context of a symphony orchestra and to play concertos with the symphony orchestra.

Our good friends at the Toledo Symphony Orchestra sort of took the baton from there and started to do some work in looking at whether you could recycle material and use recycled plastic to make 3D instruments. And then most recently, the ball has come back to Canada, and we've started to look at how we can make it more accessible using at-home 3D printers and less expensive materials, like PLA.

IRA FLATOW: What is the model? What model do you use? How do you actually know what to print on the 3D printer?

MARY-ELIZABETH BROWN: Well, we get our information from a whole bunch of different sources. So we started with a basic kind of violin shape. And then from there, we pulled the measurements from a Stradivarius made in 1704. It's called the Best Strad, and you can actually have a look at it on the Library of Congress website. So we pulled the measurements from that instrument and ran some printing tests, decided that we liked a lot of it, and then we started to play with the curvature of the front and back of the instrument.

What we would say is the belly of the instrument, if you look at a violin, you see that it slants up in curves in the middle of the face of the instrument and the middle of the back. So we took some curvature measurements from a violin maker, a violin-making family, I should say, who was working in Naples at about the same time as the Gagliano family. We incorporated those and that's how we got our most latest iteration.

IRA FLATOW: Do you have to manipulate the printing material so you get the exact shape and consistency that you want?

MARY-ELIZABETH BROWN: We do. So a lot of that comes down to the sort of material you use and how it's printed. So, in this case, we used polylactic acid, which comes in a great big reel. It looks like a big spool of yarn. And it gets fed into a printer that melts it and draws tiny little lines. They're about 0.4 millimeters thick. And we manipulate that using a computer to print the violin with tiny little spaces that resonate in between. Those spaces are made in the shape of a square, and so like a tiny little checkerboard shape inside the instrument because that's what helps it to resonate best.

IRA FLATOW: Oh, so the square shape makes better sound.

MARY-ELIZABETH BROWN: It does. There's actually been some really interesting research recently about plastic polymers and the various shapes, the internally printed shapes, that sound best. So a square pattern definitely sounds better than, for example, a honeycomb pattern or a star shape.

IRA FLATOW: Wow. So you must have printed a lot of violins before, a lot of trial and error here before you got what you wanted.

MARY-ELIZABETH BROWN: Indeed, and there have been some really great flops along the way, things that have sounded like tin cans. The most recent ended up looking a little bit like a mound of pink spaghetti in the middle of my 3D printer. There are lots of different versions of trial and error.

IRA FLATOW: Wow. And so what's the design that you ended up with? And how much does it cost?

MARY-ELIZABETH BROWN: So the current design is made all in PLA. It's in two parts that fit together. So a child-sized instrument, a fractional sized instrument costs about $7 US to print.

IRA FLATOW: Wow, wow. And the goal, of course, in printing this is to make violins that people can afford to practice on and use in schools.

MARY-ELIZABETH BROWN: Absolutely, and can be recycled when they're done.

IRA FLATOW: I hadn't thought about that. Now let's get to the all-important question, sort of a drum roll moment. What about the sound? Mary-Elizabeth, can you play both violins, your beautiful old Italian one and the one you made for 7 bucks, and see if I can guess which one is made of plastic?

MARY-ELIZABETH BROWN: OK, option number one.

[VIOLIN PLAYING]

IRA FLATOW: OK, that was option number one. Here's number two.

[VIOLIN PLAYING]

Beautiful, beautiful.

MARY-ELIZABETH BROWN: OK, Ira, what do you think?

IRA FLATOW: Oh. Oh, my goodness. I have no idea. If I had to guess, I would just guess the first one was the older violin, and the second one was the 3D-printed one.

MARY-ELIZABETH BROWN: You are right.

IRA FLATOW: But it was so close, it was just a guess.

MARY-ELIZABETH BROWN: You're right. And so the difference here being that probably less about how it sounds and more about how it feels to play. They feel a little bit different that way. But they're hard to tell apart. You're the first person who's been able to guess that one right.

IRA FLATOW: Well, it was just a guess. I could tell in the second one, it seemed like it was a little more difficult to play from the way I heard it. I've never played a violin in my life, so I could not tell. But to a trained musician like yourself, what is the difference? Is it just the difficulty? Because the sound was excellent.

MARY-ELIZABETH BROWN: Well, so it's exactly the same piece of music. And if anyone is curious about what that is, that's a piece of music called "The Meditation," and it's from an opera called Thais. The playing is a lot about physics. And it's about how we take horsehair, so that's what stretched across the bow, and how we rub it against metal, and then that transfers into the body of the instrument.

And so a skillful violin player is able to do a number of things with the bow. So we will adjust the rate of speed at which the hair travels across the string, and how much pressure we use to rub the hair across the string, so how much friction we create, and where between the bridge and the beginning of the fingerboard, the contact point that we use. So those are the three kind of basic factors that are involved in violin playing, or in sound production, I should say.

And so, on a 3D-printed instrument, we have to use substantially less weight and a little bit more speed of the bow to help to kind of draw out this sound, as opposed to my Italian instrument, which is sort of like opening up a wonderful painter's palette full of color.

IRA FLATOW: I imagine wood, especially beautiful, old wood, sounds very different from plastic, right? How did you account for that difference?

MARY-ELIZABETH BROWN: So wood is porous. And one of the considerations that we needed to account for was the fact that plastic is not. And so when we talk about this relationship between wood and plastic, we come back to that research about the internally printed spaces, whether they're square-shaped or star-shaped, within the printed PLA.

So that gives us a degree of flexibility, a degree of space and air pockets in the material that gets sort of as close as we could to printing what would be the equivalent of wood. And we go back to the idea of total flops. There are PLA spools that are composites of polylactic acid and bamboo. And that was another disaster, where it was not strong enough to withhold the weight of the bridge. So we had a great big hole in the middle of an instrument that was not so good either.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah, I hate it when that happens. You know?

MARY-ELIZABETH BROWN: I know.

[LAUGHTER]

D PETERSCHMIDT: That's Science Friday host Ira Flatow talking with concert violinist Mary-Elizabeth Brown. We'll be right back.

IRA FLATOW: But as you say, the point of your 3D printing is not to make a comparable instrument as much as it is to make a serviceable one that new players, amateurs, can learn on, right?

MARY-ELIZABETH BROWN: Exactly, and I'm very fortunate that I have been able to play on this very fine Italian instrument for quite a long time. It's a real joy to play on. But a beginning violinist doesn't need that. And the goal of this has never been to replace or replicate that. The goal has been to create an instrument that is easy to maintain, that's durable, and that gives people a really easy access point to music education.

RASHA ARIDI: Yes. So what does it mean to you, then, as a violinist and educator to be able to make something that can end up in children's hands?

MARY-ELIZABETH BROWN: I've been very, very lucky. I will go and lead a rehearsal for a production of Puccini's opera La Boheme later today. I live my life in this wonderful sea of beautiful music. But had I not done that, had I done something else with my life, the very serious musical education that I had would have served me well in so many ways. And I think that it is a wonderful opportunity for young people to learn everything from focus and discipline to setting and hitting goals, to working well with other people as we play together in the orchestra or in chamber music. There are just so many things that we learn. And so if I can, in some way, help more young people to come to that, I think that would be a wonderful thing.

IRA FLATOW: When can we expect these violins to be made widely available? I mean, will there be a day where I can take the design and put it into my own 3D printer and make a violin?

MARY-ELIZABETH BROWN: Well, that's really the idea. And at the moment, we are in the final stages, the final iterations. As somebody who is a professional violinist and a teacher, I would like to make sure that it has my stamp of approval on every element of it before we start our beta testing, which we hope to start later in the spring of this year. And hopefully we'll have these out and available by the end of 2023.

IRA FLATOW: Now I know that 3D-printed instruments have been made before, so what makes your violin different from other models?

MARY-ELIZABETH BROWN: That's a good question. I think the main difference is that we have really dug into the disciplines of physics and acoustics and violin-making. And we've involved researchers from all around the world in this process. I think also, coming to this as a professional musician, coming to this as somebody who plays on a very fine instrument, and looking for the closest possible sound in that gives us a different sort of view or helps us to see that or hear that through a different lens.

I think, lastly, most of this is about finding fractional-sized instruments. Most of the instruments that people are printing these days are for adults. But ideally, we start children when they're quite young. So we have been printing 10th and 16th sized instruments, which are small enough for the average six-year-old.

IRA FLATOW: So you really went above and beyond to make this super easy for kids to use.

MARY-ELIZABETH BROWN: Yeah. One of the big things that's different about this model of instrument is that the bridge and the sound post are printed in. So nothing on a violin, on a regular violin, is glued. So everything's held in place by tension. And that means that if you need to have anything done, you really need to go and see a luthier to do that for you.

And the inspiration from this came from one of my dear students who lives on a sailboat off the coast of New Zealand and plays the violin very well. And her bridge started to warp as they were starting a sort of two-week sail where they would not come to port. And so her mom and I sort of cowboyed steaming a bridge using boat repair tools and a clamp and a tea kettle. And it--

IRA FLATOW: Lots of MacGyvery here.

MARY-ELIZABETH BROWN: We really did MacGyver this, and it really got me thinking. It's one thing to put instruments into the hands of young people. It's another thing to then saddle them with the cost of continued maintenance and having continued repairs and other things. So a lot of this last iteration, especially with the little instruments, have to do with printing in the bridge in the sound post so that there would be limited MacGyvering needed, wherever they ended up.

IRA FLATOW: Do you have to paint it to look like a violin? I mean, does it come out-- it must come out in a multitude of colors.

MARY-ELIZABETH BROWN: Well, the one that I played to you today is white. But I have pink iridescent thermoplastic filament in my printer at the moment. So the next one that gets printed is going to be a sort of fuchsia color. So it can come in any kind of color you like.

IRA FLATOW: Well, I would imagine that's a plus when you're introducing kids to violins. It looks kind of cool, right? It doesn't look scary.

MARY-ELIZABETH BROWN: Exactly. I had a student just this morning who's eight, who said, hey, Miss Mary-Beth-- which is what they've called me for the last 20 years. Hey, Miss Mary-Beth, could you print me a blue one? I think I might play more scales if it were blue.

IRA FLATOW: That's a great anecdote. Well, thank you, Mary-Beth for taking time to be with us today.

MARY-ELIZABETH BROWN: My pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.

IRA FLATOW: Yes, and good luck to you. Dr. Mary-Elizabeth Brown is a concert violinist and the founder and director of the AVIVA Young Artists Program based in Montreal, Quebec.

D PETERSCHMIDT: You can sign up for updates on the project at printaviolin.com. And Science Friday has a new project out. It's a limited run newsletter called Sincerely Science. And my colleague Emma Gomez will introduce you to six scientists who talk about the human side of research. Every week, for six weeks, no matter when you sign up, you'll get a story in your inbox from a person with a cool science career. This newsletter does a really good job at humanizing the stories of scientists. It shows how success and failure are both a part of the process. And it gives scientists a chance to reflect on the doubts and joys of their work. You can subscribe to it at sciencefriday.com/sincerelyscience.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Universe of Art is hosted and produced by me, D Peterschmidt, and I also wrote the theme music. Charles Bergquist and John Dankosky provided production assistance. And our show art is illustrated by Abelle Hayford. The segment you just heard was originally produced by Science Friday producer Rasha Aridi. And support for Science Friday's science and arts coverage comes from the Alfred B. Sloan Foundation. Also, if you have an idea for a future episode of Universe of Art, send us an email or a voice memo to universe@sciencefriday.com. We'll be back in two weeks. See ya.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Copyright © 2023 Science Friday Initiative. All rights reserved. Science Friday transcripts are produced on a tight deadline by 3Play Media. Fidelity to the original aired/published audio or video file might vary, and text might be updated or amended in the future. For the authoritative record of Science Friday’s programming, please visit the original aired/published recording. For terms of use and more information, visit our policies pages at http://www.sciencefriday.com/about/policies/.