Fractal antennas are being used in the wild: https://hackaday.com/2018/06/12/teardown-locates-fractal-antenna/ And it's fairly common for people to use cnc routers to cut speaker shapes out as a bunch of layers: https://goo.gl/images/ikaRyo Much cheaper than plastic filament and mdf has good acoustic properties. There's some neat algorithmic architecture too: https://goo.gl/images/f8hKdm I like your idea of fancy instrument shapes. On Sun, Jul 15, 2018, 6:22 PM Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> wrote:
I was at a symphony concert last night & I started thinking about "high tech" musical instruments (or the lack thereof).
It occurred to me that a lot of existing instruments could be partially or wholly made using 3D printers. But then it also occurred to me that whole new classes of instruments could be made using 3D printers that could never be fabricated in any other way.
For example, many instruments have resonant chambers of varying sizes (i.e., frequencies) and other characteristics. But stereo speaker cabinets also have resonant chambers of varying sizes.
By using a 3D printer, it should be possible to make instruments (including speaker housings) with many, many different resonant frequencies and characteristics.
While 3D printing may not be cheap enough for large volume :-) production, it is cheap enough for home experimentation.
I'm curious if anyone has married *fractal* patterns and musical instruments & audio speakers with 3D printers?
Also, I don't think that the final word has been said about antennae for the electromagnetic spectrum. There may be sophisticated antennae which can only be fabricated using 3D printing, and which have much more interesting properties than the simply antennae we learned as EE undergrads.
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