3D Technology Gets Musical Results at Ward Melville High School

It's a project that senior Maria Scutari said she has been working on since last summer. The Ward Melville HS senior has created a pendant ocarina, a music instrument in the vessel flute family, using a three-dimensional printer, a mathematical formula, and her own creativity combined with design assistance from physics and technology teachers at the high school as well as a scientist from Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Patch first described the school's new three-dimensional printer – which cost around $15,000 – in this TechnoFiles column:

Imagine if the printer on your desk not only printed two-dimensional pictures, but could actually print a three-dimensional object. ... It uses technology similar to an inkjet printer, but instead of ink it deposits small particles of semi-melted plastic. When it finishes a layer, it repeats the process until the entire part is complete.

Scutari, a self-described collector of ocarinas, designed the pendant ocarina as an interdisciplinary project she submitted for her quarterly final project in her AP music theory class. She worked with WMHS technology teacher John Williams and with Dr. Thomas Butcher, head of the Energy Resources Division at Brookhaven National Laboratory. She incorporated the use of the Helmholtz resonator formula, an engineering concept which is "commonly applied to musical instruments but is also found as automobile mufflers and subwoofers," according to Gulf Coast Data Concepts.

Her pendant ocarina is a working musical instrument.

“The fact that it plays tells me that what I understood about how the instrument works is true,” said Scutari, who will attend Stony Brook University next year as a mechanical engineering major. “Although, the end product didn’t play the note that I expected – it was two half-steps below what I anticipated."

She continued: “I plan on continuing to improve the design and hopefully print a newer model made of ceramic once I learn more about the correlation between the Helmholtz Resonator formula and the ocarina."