- Everyone's shocked at how good it actually sounded was incredible.

- Our biggest problem with this is that no one believes it until they can physically touch it.

And that is our biggest reception is, people who hear it love it.

People who just hear the idea don't believe it.

(lively music) - Hi, my name is Matthew Canel and I am the founder and engineer for 3D music.

- Hi, my name is Ben Kaufman and I'm the co-founder and business developer at 3D music.

We're making 3D printed plastic, acoustic violins for schools and research purposes.

So that way we can make things that are cheaper, easier to maintain than traditional wooden violins, more durable, and more resistant to weather elements and climate changes, while also being drop resistant and throw resistant.

(violin bangs) You can see that these can take a hit.

- If you did that to a wooden violin just imagine how upset everyone involved would be.

- I graduated at Case with a degree in computer engineering in 2012, and a degree in management in 2013, and have sort of stuck around the area, helping out doing various startups.

- And I graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering and technical theater in 2020, and a master's in mechanical engineering in 2021.

I'm trying to decide if I should dare try to play in the answer is, I really shouldn't.

I don't play violin.

So actually this started out as a summer project for course credit, and I used to play the cello and obviously cellos are a bit big to start 3D printing.

So starting with a violin was a little bit more reasonable.

From there, I developed the quarter-size, which was in the end, my thesis.

And after I graduated, I started developing the other sizes and hope to eventually move on to other instruments as well.

- We're up to about our 108th prototype and we're just about ready to go to market and mass produce them.

- So it started with, let's make it the general shape, accounting for the fact it's plastic, so it will resonate a little differently.

From there, we actually approached a local luthier, Max Morgan, a who makes wooden instruments, and he was able to help us quite a bit with the sound profile.

Basically how our printers work, you have a roll of plastic that's fed by motor into this box right here, which has a heating element in it, which melts it, and then a micro controller computer tells it to feed the plastic out in whatever pattern you program.

This will do the 2D drawings of each layer.

And then every time it does layer it will drop down.

For our quarter-size violins, that's about a day and a half.

For our full size violin, which is a bit bigger, that'll be about two days.

They print in two parts, the body, and the neck, this one already having tuners in it.

And you can see we screw in the tuners.

These are currently off-the-shelf guitar tuners, and then they just get slotted together.

And you have some strings through the holes to the tuners, and you put a wooden bridge on it, and then you have a violin.

- This is the first startup I've worked on that was truly a physical product with no digital element at all.

And it is great being able to physically see the object change, play it, tweak it, touch it, and then just like, iterate and iterate and just keep figuring out where it's going wrong.

- It has been quite fun to see people react, to be surprised by its quality, and pleased and excited to see it.

And to have people excited to see what will become and what comes next.

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