3-D Printed Guitar

    For Light and Sound's second action project we were tasked with designing and building a guitar. With my knowledge of 3D printing I decided to 3D print my guitar. The issue with this is that it needed 150 successful hours of printing consecutively and in the realm of printing that is extremely rare. I had quite a few failures, which led to the project taking a long time to finish. However, the guitar is approximately ¾ of a full sized guitar and plays pretty smoothly.

(Guitar,JC,2015)

    A guitar produces a sound wave when it is plucked. It produces a longitudinal wave (a wave that collapses together and then expands because of the particles vibrating in the direction of the wave) because the vibrating string makes the air molecules around it vibrate. The frequency/pitch of the wave is equivalent to the frequency that the string vibrates at. Normally the wave would be very weak when plucking a string because there is nothing to amplify the sound. On a guitar since there is a wooden sound box, the string makes the whole thing vibrate just like the string so that more air is vibrated at the same pitch. Since more air is vibrating the amplitude is higher causing the sound to be louder. 

    The Doppler effect will also change the pitch of the guitar as the player moves. As the player moves towards the crowd the frequency will increase because the waves in front of the player will be pushed closer together causing the audience to hear a higher pitch. If the player moves away from the crowd the frequency will decrease for the opposite reasons. This will change how the pitch of the notes is perceived by the audience but will not actually change the notes themselves.

    The length of the guitar that I made was 29.25 inches from the bridge to the neck. The approximate frequency of an E note played on the E string is 82.4 Hz, one octave higher would be 164.8 Hz. The string width is .056 cm. The wavelengths are 3.64 meters and 1.82 meters respectively. The volume is 451.2  cubic inches.

(Sketch,JC,2015)