UConn researchers can digitally remove dents and cracks in original instrument pieces, as they duplicate antique mouthpieces.
They just don’t make 'em like they used to, unless you put a bunch of Ph.D.s in a room with a 3D printer.
Engineers at UConn have teamed with musicologists to produce -- or rather, re-produce -- key parts of vintage musical instruments, literally breathing life back into antique saxophones and the like.
Robert Howe is a medical doctor and, as if medical school wasn’t tough enough, he's now a Ph.D. candidate in music history and theory at UConn. It occurred to Howe back in 2010 that cat scans, X-rays, and similar medical technology might also be used to explore the inner spaces of antique oboes, flutes, and saxophones.
Measuring to the nearest micron, Howe then hoped to replicate parts of rare instruments that had long since deteriorated, such their unique mouthpieces. He showed me a saxophone made in the 1860s, by the inventor of the instrument, Adolph Sax.
Attaching the right mouthpiece to an antique saxophone means hearing the instrument as it was meant to be played.
"So when I received this, it had had a mouthpiece with it, and the mouthpiece is early 20th century manufacture, and it plays in a particular way," Howe said. "But in the course of our project, we’ve replicated what we believe to be an authentic or nearly authentic copy of what Sax would have made. And you can see that it’s shorter and it’s narrower, and it has a different shape to the tone chamber."
Those subtle, geometric nuances are critical, especially with the ten or so surviving, original mouthpieces crafted by Sax himself. While Howe was skilled at essentially performing endoscopies on wind instruments, he lacked the expertise required to make exact copies.
In 2013, Howe met Sina Shahbazmohamadi, director of imaging at UConn’s Center for Clean Energy and Engineering, now an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Manhattan College in the Bronx. He had a suggestion. "In order to have a more robust, fool-proof, mechanism to duplicate these things, let’s use 3D printing," Shahbazmohamadi said. "The machine just reads our images, and turns them into the mouthpieces."
The process allowed Shahbazmohamadi to digitally remove dings, dents, and cracks that existed in the originals, and even duplicate antique mouthpieces that no longer existed. "We had only the tenor mouthpiece for the saxophone," he said. "But digitally, we were able to adjust the sizes so that we create the mouthpieces for other versions, such as alto, baritone, and soprano -- but the real, antique mouthpieces, they do not exist."
"It's a sweeter sound. It's more mellow."
Richard Bass
For the same reasons that you can’t just stick a Volkswagen carburetor in a Maserati, or any old smile on the Mona Lisa, attaching the right mouthpiece to an antique saxophone means hearing the instrument as it was meant to be played.
Howe’s advisor at UConn, Professor Richard Bass, said the difference is immediately obvious. "It’s a sweeter sound. It’s more mellow," he said. "It’s something that would have blended better with the other wind instruments that were in use at the time Sax was making these instruments."
That is an objective worth pursuing, according to Eric Rice, head of UConn’s Music Department, and artistic director of the Connecticut Early Music Festival. "The early music movement is really about recovering the sounds of the past," he said. "And this kind of work allows us to get much closer to the original instrument which, in theory at least, allows us to get much closer to the original sound."
While others have attempted to recreate rare instruments, such as Stradivarius violins, with specialized milling machines, this is the first time, say Howe and Bass, that antique instruments are being duplicated in such precise detail. They, along with Shahbazmohamdai, have applied for a patent for the process and hope to one day print out complete, antique musical instrument replicas with the push of a button.
Not exactly jazz, but still pretty cool.
Tom Verde is a freelance reporter based in Connecticut.
