3d Printed Sounds – Nirvana meets Objet
It sounds like a wax cylinder recording – muffled and full of static, but the 3d printed record clearly sounds like Nirvana. Amanda Ghassaei 3d printed the record using a high resolution Objet printer after creating the model with the Processing programming language. The tool she created converts a digital MP3 into the 3d model of the record, which then can be printed. Even though the Objet Connex 500 is a printer with extremely fine detail, normal records are analog and the sound quality is much better. The record uses a sample rate that’s one fourth the quality of normal MP3s.
Ghassaei created an instructable on how she created the 3d record. The instructions detail her entire process, from early tests, to the final examples of the Pixies and Nirvana. She says a minute of audio is about 200MB, or 4 million polygons, so normal 3d printing software would have problems with an entire record worth of audio.
The last time we saw 3d printed records, it was the 3d printed Fisher Price toy records from Fred Murphy. He originally used a CNC router to cut the records and then successfully 3d printed the model. But as you can hear in the video, Murphy’s records don’t compare.