Science Friday - Beavers, Pando Tree, $7 Violin. July 7, 2023. Part 1

Episode Date: July 7, 2023

How The Humble Beaver Shaped A Continent The American beaver, Castor canadensis, nearly didn’t survive European colonialism in the United States. Prized for its dense, lustrous fur, and also sought after for the oil from its tail glands, the species was killed by the tens of thousands, year after year, until conservation efforts in the late 19th century turned the tide. In her new book, Beaverland: How One Weird Rodent Made America, author Leila Philipp tells that tale—and the ecological cost of this near-extermination. But she also has good news: beavers, and their skillful engineering of waterways, have the potential to ease the fire, drought and floods of a changing climate. She talks to Ira about the powerful footprint of the humble beaver.   The Sweet Song Of The Largest Tree On Earth For this story, we’re taking a trip to south central Utah and into the Fishlake National Forest to visit the largest tree on earth, an aspen named Pando. The strange thing about Pando is that it doesn’t really look like the world’s biggest tree. It has rolling hills with thousands of tall, lean aspens swaying in the wind. But Pando is there, hiding in plain sight. All those tree trunks you see aren’t actually individual trees. Technically, they’re branches, and that’s because Pando is one massive tree—sprawling more than 100 acres, with 47,000 branches growing from it. There is a lot to learn about Pando, and our guests turned to sound to understand the tree better. Together, they created an “acoustic portrait” to hear all the snaps, splinters, and scuttles that happen in and around the tree. Ira talks with Jeff Rice, a sound artist and co-founder of the Acoustic Atlas at the Montana State University Library, and Lance Oditt, executive director of the non-profit Friends of Pando, which is dedicated to preserving the tree.   This $7 Violin May Be $7... But How Does It Sound? Stringed instruments can be a joy to the ears and the eyes. They’re handcrafted, made of beautiful wood, and the very best ones are centuries old, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, or sometimes even millions. But there’s a new violin in the works—one that’s 3D-printed. It costs just a few bucks to print, making it an affordable and accessible option for young learners and classrooms. Dr. Mary-Elizabeth Brown is a concert violinist and the founder and director of the AVIVA Young Artists Program in Montreal, Quebec, and she’s been tinkering with the design of 3D-printed violins for years. She talks with Ira about the science behind violins, the design process, and how she manages to turn $7 worth of plastic into a beautiful sounding instrument.   To stay updated on all-things-science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters. Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Later in the hour, listening in on the largest tree on earth. It's an aspen named Pando. And exploring what gives a violin its sound, including how to 3D print a good-sounding plastic violin. But first, what happens when an entire continent loses the vast majority of its beaver population and the services of this vital ecosystem engineer? That is, in fact, the story of North America after European colonization. and the loss of beavers and the effort to reintroduce them may shape what happens to our ecosystems for better or worse under future climate change. Lila Philip is here with me to tell that story. She's the author of the book Beaverland, How One Weird Rodent Made America.

Leela, your book is really, you'll have to excuse me, a Leave It to Beaver story. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you so much. I'm so glad to be here with you. Nice to have you. I know you start this book with your own local story about your local beavers and how they turned a wetland into a pond. How dramatic was this change? It happened so fast. So I walked past this swampy area with my dog probably every day and just didn't really pay much attention to it. And then one day we walked past and it was just full of water. Beaver's had cut down some trees and in very short order. swelled the water. And what's amazing about what beavers do is they'll come to a creek. In this case, the little area near my pond was just a little trickling creek and they swell it with a

dam. And in this case, they stayed in that area because it was a low area and they didn't need to move on. There was plenty of food. After they'd cut down enough trees to build the pond, they then fed on the aquatic vegetation there. After the beavers made the... this pond, what was incredible was the biodiversity that followed. So so many animals, just bobcats and muskrat and mink and otters. It was just remarkable. And how much water do they store? After all, they are incredible engineers, as you say. I mean, that was the other thing that was incredible. And I leaned into in writing this book, because we know climate change is going to create far more devastating floods and fires, not to mention periods of

extreme heat and drought. And beavers can help us deal with these problems because they bring water. So to go to your question, they'll go to a creek and they'll swell it out with water and then they'll move down further and they'll swell it out again. So what was once a single thread of water looks from above like a line of almost beads on a chain. And then the beavers will build canals into the woods on either side because they need them for transportation. And so the water has a lot of interaction with the land. If you get a flood, the water has a lot of places to go so that instead of ripping through the stream system, the water has a chance to settle down. And this is why it may seem counterintuitive to people, but beavers actually help with flooding. And science has

actually been supporting this with study after study in recent years. And then around their ponds are these marshy areas that are wetlands. So a wetland, the water you can see is just the beginning. Because underneath, imagine this giant sponge you can't see. So every one of these beaver damming complexes is like a giant invisible sponge storing water for times of drought. And we need that water, which is why beavers are so incredibly important to the health of, you know, the whole ecosystem. And you make that point in your book, that indigenous peoples of North America knew what you're telling me. They knew that beavers were crucial to the health of their ecosystems. They even forbade hunting of beavers, didn't they?

That was one of the really interesting things that I learned when researching and writing this book. the indigenous peoples that lived throughout North America understood the ecological value of the beavers. So the Algonquian peoples of the woodland areas of the Atlantic seaboard and up through the Great Lakes area, had these wonderful stories of great beaver that are important teaching stories about beaver, and they had strict rules about how to hunt and harvest beavers. And out in the arid northern plains in places like Montana, the Blackfeet and other peoples out there actually had prohibitions against hunting the beaver because they understood the value the beaver played in keeping water in the land. So this knowledge base is something that I think it's pretty interesting that our science now is almost catching up to. geomorphologists, ecohydrologists, wildlife managers are all beginning to really understand and

study the value of the beaver as what is called a keystone species. So you're talking about how the country was filled with beaver and then in the book it talks about how European settlers came in and totally disrupted the ecosystem. Yeah, I mean, I think colonization was environmentally devastating on many respects. But the, the, the, fur trade, which wiped out the beaver, geomorphologists now talk about that as the great drying because basically what happened was the river systems very quickly became degraded without beavers in them. So in what are called paleo rivers or rivers before colonization, you don't have single channel rivers that we see today that run along one thread. Instead,

you would have multi-threaded, braided creeks and streams that were messy and multi-threaded and would overspill, contract, and then recede with the rhythm of the seasons. And so they were, imagine them as arteries or veins of water that were pulsing life into the land. That's a river system that is working at peak hydraulic function. So when the beavers were taken out and no longer able to maintain the river systems, you had really huge impact. At the height of the beaver trade, these animals were slaughtered by the tens of thousands every year. How did we get it together to protect beavers after this massive kill-off? Did we realize their value?

Well, that's what's so kind of amazing and fantastic about this story, is that, you know, Well, we didn't understand yet their value to us as environmental restoration partners, which we do understand now, but smart policies at the right time in the early 1900s brought beavers back. It's part of this kind of counterintuitive North American wildlife program that we had, which was fantastically successful. And in a counterintuitive way, it was actually based on bringing wildlife. back for hunting and trapping. So at that time, the idea was to return wildlife as a hunting and trapping resource.

But thank goodness the beaver were returned. They rebounded. And now we understand that a live beaver is much more valuable than a pelt. There's always going to be human wildlife conflict because we live where the wildlife have always been. But I have to say, there are now very sophisticated, methods for controlling beavers with non-lethal methods and flow devices and pond levelers. The places where I have seen those fail, often they have been jerry-rigged solutions that

towns have done, you know, the highway department has just put maybe some wire over the culvert. And of course, beavers can just stick, you know, stuff wire and block the culvert right back up. So I think it really behooves a town or a community to explore in a really full way, non-lethal methods before they do things like start breaking the dam. Because breaking a dam is just often a very unproductive way of managing beavers. Either you drive the beavers away and you have no more pond anymore, so you lose all that biodiversity and the beautiful pond. and the beavers go somewhere else to create a problem for someone else if habitat is limited. Or the beavers may die because if it's November and they can't have shelter in time, there'll be, you know, winter is coming.

This is such an interesting book. I learned so much from your book. For example, who knew that a million years ago, beaver were as big as bears? Wow. Yeah. Yeah, isn't that amazing? I mean, they've been on the continent for something like 37 million years. And I like to imagine beaver land. I mean, imagine North America when there were 400 million beaver living on it and so much water pulsing through the land and the great boreal forests. No wonder there was a tremendous resource of wildlife that sprang up throughout the continent. Well, I want to ask you one last question about that, about 400 million beaver. You talk about that with climate change and the future challenges we're going to face,

how will beaver help us face those challenges? It has been shown in study after study that beaver wetlands hold nine times more water than areas without beavers. So imagine if in the coming times of drought you have these big sponges of water in the land. That's going to help everything. out west, there are now the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service just funded a study looking not just can beavers help prevent wildfires, but how many beavers where? So in other words, harnessing beaver wetlands to use this kind of speed bumps for wildfires. And in flooding, out in Milwaukee, there's a study that was done in 2021. I write about this in the book where they're looking at the watershed of the Milwaukee.

River, and they've estimated that if they put in literally 4,500, and I think it's 63 Beaver, they can create water storage for 1.7 trillion gallons of water, and that is water storage valued at $3.3 billion annually. And I think we should think about beavers like millions of highly trained engineers out there, ready to work for us for free, instead of instinctively thinking of them as nuisance pests. And I think if we can change that paradigm, we'll be a lot better off. Unfortunately, Lila, we have run out of time. I want to thank you for taking time to be with us today. Thank you so much for having me. Lila Philip, author of Beaverland, How One Weird Rodent Made America. After the break, listening in on the largest tree on earth, an aspen named Pando.

The chance to record the largest organism on earth is just such an incredible opportunity. and I was interested in the challenges that that posed. You know, what does that mean to record such a large organism? And so I, you know, set about trying to record it from all different angles, from the leaves to the roots. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato.

Let's take a trip to South Central Utah into the Fish Lake National Forest. Our destination, the largest tree on earth, an aspen, named Pando. The strange part of visiting Pando is it doesn't really look like the world's biggest tree. You'll see rolling hills with thousands of tall lean aspens swaying in the wind, and Pando is there hiding in plain sight because all of those tree trunks you'll see aren't actually tree trunks. No. Technically, they're branches. And that's because Pando is one massive tree sprawling more than 100 acres with 47,000 branches growing from it. There's a lot to learn about Pando, and my next guest turned to sound to understand the tree better

and created an acoustic portrait to hear all the snaps and splinters and scuttles that happen in around the tree. Let me introduce them. Jeff Rice, a sound artist and co-founder of the Acoustic Atlas at the Montana State University Library. He's based in Seattle. Lance Ode, Executive Director of the Nonprofit Friends of Pando, which is dedicated to preserving the tree. It's based in Ridgefield, Utah. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for having us.

Thanks for having us, Ira, huge fans. Thank you. You know, I described the picture of this tree. When I look at the picture of Pando, it does look like a forest, Lance and not a single tree. What's going on here? Well, Pando is a tree of one. We haven't known about it very long, but basically it's one. seed and that has split and sort of like a giant algorithm. It's spread out over time towards us

in history. So all those trees are actually, as I said before, they're branches. Yeah. So they're genetically identical branches. They look like tree trunks to us. The botanical term is stems, technically, but most people think stems is like a weed in their yard or maybe something coming off a rose bush. These are fully sized parts of one tree that's all connected by this massive. of root system. Yeah, I know I've experienced that when I try to dig a hole from my plants and there are all these roots under there. You got it. Or branches, yeah. Are all aspens like this, Lance? No, but all aspens have the ability to self-propagate. The self-replication is actually a reproductive strategy. Often we see what are called aspen clones typically in response to some stress event.

The tree will kind of, in human terms, of course, it's a tree, make a decision. Am I going to just try to do the pollen thing, or am I going to just self-propagate? And so Pando's been self-propagating towards us in history for about 9,000 years. 9,000 years. What does Pando mean? Why is it called Pando? Boy, there's a lot of interesting history there around that. Iro, typically the people who discover something, you know, in the botanical world or in biology, they get to name it.

Basically, they nicknamed the tree Pando, and that's Latin for eyes spread. And they called it that because of how it spreads out over its land mass. It dominates the land that it calls home. It's a stable Aspen. Wow. Okay, Jeff, let's talk about recording Pando. You hold out your microphones next to Pando. Why are you attracted to this? What did you do, actually? Well, I've been recording sounds in the West for more than 20 years, and I've always loved the of aspen trees and it's really a defining sound of the West for me I love the delicate you know trembling sound of it and so that's the first thing that attracted me and I always like recording aspen but just the the chance to

record the largest organism on earth is just such an incredible opportunity and I was interested in the challenges that that posed you know what does that mean to record such a large organism and so I you know said about trying to record it from all different angles, from the leaves to the roots. So you actually stuck your microphone into the trunks of the trees down to the roots? Yeah, yeah. I started recording, you know, traditional recordings, like, you know, ambasonic recordings of the soundscapes, the birds and the leaves and the weather.

But, you know, there's a great story about how we started recording the roots. I wanted to find another way of listening to Pando, and I'd heard that trees make vibrations and that people have recorded those vibrations, and I thought, wouldn't it be interesting to record the roots of Pando? And I really didn't know what that meant, but I asked Lance if he could show me where I could find some roots

that I might be able to hook a microphone to, and Lance knows everything about Pando. He's been photographing the forest for, for years making one of the greatest photographic surveys of any tree. So he was able to show me some places where I could put my microphone. And we found a hole in one of the branches, essentially, at the base. And we were able to access the roots at that point and plug the hydrophone in, sort of like plugging into a socket, really.

All right. Let's take a listen. We have a recording of that. Let's hear that now. Wow. It sounds like we New Yorkers a subway train going by. What are we listening to? So that's the sound of, you know, the leaves, I think, rattling on the tree in a thunderstorm.

A thunderstorm rolled in and it created a lot of wind that then blew the leaves that trembled. And the vibration of those leaves passed all the way through the tree right into the ground. where we had the hydrophone. And, you know, it's this delicate, trembling sound is strong enough that it actually vibrates the earth in a sense. The story of that day, I mean, it's still exhilarating just to think about it. And it's great to be here with Jeff talking about that moment because we were just both like, wow, for the first time, we're hearing kind of the, like we put a submarine in the ground

and we're hearing Pando's subterranean soundcape for the first time. And I already knew there's a lot of applications for this, but hearing, it after spending what seven years in the tree was just i was literally jumping up and down for joy irea amazing lans i assume that you know every inch of pando so what was it like hearing the sounds from underground did you hear anything new it was exciting and yes we heard a lot of new things we heard the sound of the storm traveling through one of these branches that can reach 80 feet into the sky and mind you pando's homeland's already at about 9200 feet it moves between about 80s and 8,9,9,200 feet.

In terms of the sounds themselves, Ira, learned a lot. But when we first recorded it, me and Jeff were in the field. He's like, Camere, and it reminds me of that quote about what's exciting about science. It's not, oh, well, this is true or not true. It's what's that? Yeah. And so we're out in the field, and this happened to be a sunny day, and I'd scouted some locations for Jeff. And, mind you, Pando's root system is so dense that the trees don't tend to break off at the foot or uproot like you see a lot, the Pacific Northwest or other parts of the world.

They just literally kind of break off at the ground like a matchstick. And so it's hard to get into the root system. And Jeff's like, what's that? It was exactly that. It was what's that. And that was exhilarating. Well, I can bet. And I have a picture of Jeff walking around, shaking a lot of branches.

figuring out what to record. Was it something like that? It was, yeah, it was very organic. I mean, it was an exploration, really,

of Pando, and I didn't always know what I was going to find, and it was a real surprise. The second that I put on my headphones and started listening to the hydrophone, I heard a signal that I wasn't sure what it was. And, yeah,

we started exploring and actually, you know, wondering, like, well, are we connected? to the root system and are these branches connected to each other by sound? And we started banging on trees in different parts of the forest away from the hydrophone. I think Lance walked about 100 feet away from where we were set up with the microphone

and started banging on a tree. And you could hear the sound passing through the ground into the hydrophone. Whoa, wow. Let me stop you there because I know you recorded this. Let's play a clip of this to hear what that sounded like. The thumps, they are subtle, but they are there. So the sounds are traveling almost 100 feet through the ground from tree to tree. When we were doing the banging on the tree, we don't know for sure that that was, that banging was passing through the roots.

You know, that could have been passing through the soil. And there need to be some, you know, real scientific studies to determine that. This wasn't a scientific expedition. It was an exploration and of discovery. But, you know, it certainly shows. that the branches and the sound from the branches, it's all interconnected. And I think that's the takeaway, you know, whether it's passing through the roots, they're going to have to do some special studies to really determine that. But it doesn't take away from the fact that it's

interesting and that it's, you know, that it shows an interconnectedness. Yeah, all the more reason to go out and study Pando some more. Yeah, we've been doing some research on the background based off just work to talk about how we can use sound. And there's a lot of really exciting developments there that tell us tell us well we have a few it's early but i'll give you an example um pando's homeland is in a graben that's the place where there's a like a fault line and it's spreading apart because there's hot magma below so pando's landmass is littered with volcanic boulders and lava fields so it's really hard to get a subterranean picture of the tree so imagine then you know based on Jeff's work and some other work we're doing with other researchers that we could use sound to literally

trace the root system of Pando and identify how all that works to better take care of the tree. And so would you learn about the soil and water flow and things like that or maybe even the wildlife living there underground? Absolutely. So yes, we can definitely look at soil quality. We can look at water. As far as wildlife, Jeff did record wildlife. and we have plans to set up audio conservation systems or bioacoustic stations in the tree this year to help us with wildlife.

Then when you're looking at water, nutrient transposition, disease, things like that, it's reasonable to assume that trees that aren't doing so well may have different frequencies because aspirin are water-hungry trees. And so basically each of these trunks is acting like a transducer. We may be able to use sound in a way. So beyond the subterranean, there's a lot of work that this could help us with. above ground as well, Ira. Interesting. Jeff, one of my favorite recordings you made is a little mystery critter that your hydrophone

picked up. Let me play that clip for us now. Like a buzzing. What is that? That was the question I asked when I first heard it. You know, these recordings, typically I make them in the field and I don't get to hear them until I get back to the studio. And I was just listening in the studio to the underground recording.

and suddenly I heard this little voice and I just was stopped in my tracks. I thought, what is that? Again, that question, what is that? And I think it's just, it might be a beetle or something. You're always discovering new sounds when you make recordings and there's a lot to the underground soundscape. Lance, do you have any guesses of what that might be? So I feel somewhat confident to say that that was the sound of foxes and birds. our field crews are trained specifically to watch out for those because they'll dig them under giant

juniper bushes and they are very deep. So my assumption is it could have been a bird call, but most likely it was foxes underground because Jeff, correct me if I'm wrong. Wasn't that recorded during the storm? It was recorded during the thunderstorm, although I would disagree that it's a fox. This is the kind of thing that we go back and forth on IRA. I imagine. It's pure speculation as to what it is, but somebody has told me that they thought it was a beetle, and that's what it sounds like to me. But whatever it is, I call it the mystery creature, and it's just an indication that there's a mystery world beneath the tree

and in the underground substrate. This is Science Friday. I'm Irooflado. In case you're just joining us, I'm talking with Jeff Rice, a sound artist and co-founder of the Acute. Atkinsic Atlas, that's at Montana State University Library, and Lance Odeh, executive director of the nonprofit Friends of Pando. And together, they created an acoustic portrait of the largest tree on earth named Pando. What is the health of Pando? Is it flourishing? Is it being threatened?

There is some research that has suggested that it's dying. But what people have to remember is that Pando, it regenerates itself. And that's a hormone cycle. And so the hormone cycle that sends regeneration has not ended. Well, we know that it's still doing the hormone cycle that basically when a branch falls, a bunch of that hormone material goes back into the root, the root goes, hey, send another one up. I got to balance energy production, regeneration, and defense.

In terms of like collapse and things like that, Ira, there's been some data that suggests that we're heading in that direction. and there are models to abate that. And we are official partners with Fish Lake National Forest dealing with those issues. But again, there are models for what is called Aspen Collapse, and Pando is nowhere near that by the best models or estimates. So while there is a lot of headlines to that effect,

we just need to know more. It's early, Ira. It's only been 14, 15 years since we just really said, oh my gosh, this thing is really here. it's the largest tree in the world. It's a tree that redefines tree, what a tree can be, what a tree can mean. Incredible. Jeff, obviously, as a radio person, I love sound. I've dealt with it most of my life.

But what do you, as a sound recordist, what do you take away from all of this? Why do you take such care to record the sounds of our world? You know, partly just fascination, but I always learn so much when I turn on my microphone. And the more I recorded, you know, Pando, the more I learned about it. And, you know, my goal was to really figure out what's the sound of one of the world's largest organisms? And what I came away, you know, understanding was that the sound is lots of different things. You know, it's the birds that live in the tree. It's the foxes and the insects underneath the ground.

It's the leaves and the earth shaking in the storm. It's the weather. it's all connected and so I think that's the true voice of Pando and that's what excites me about recording is just getting a sense of that

interconnectedness of the soundscape Well you know there's that old Clint Eastwood song I talked to the trees and I guess now we could say the trees are talking back to us so thank you both for taking time to be with us today. Fascinating stuff Thank you. Thank you Ira.

Jeff Rice, a sound artist and co-founder of the Acoustic Atlas at Montana State University Library. He's based in Seattle. And Lance Oded, executive director of the nonprofit Friends of Pando based in Ridgefield, Utah. We have to take a quick break,

and when we come back, we'll hear from a violinist who designs cheap but beautiful sounding plastic violins by 3D printing them. The goal has been to create an instrument that is easy to maintain, that's durable and that gives people a really easy access point to music education. Stay with us.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. Stringed instruments can be adjoed to the ears and the eyes, handcrafted, made of beautiful wood, and the very best ones are centuries old and worth hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of dollars. Except for that violin you just heard, What if I told you it costs just a few bucks and it's made of plastic. Now, why would you want a plastic violin?

As I said, violins can get really expensive and even the beginner ones might cost you a couple of grand. And that hefty price tag makes them inaccessible for a lot of families and classrooms. But my next guest has a plan to get more violins into children's hands by 3D printing them. Yes, Dr. Mary Elizabeth Brown is a concert violin. violinist and the founder and director of the Aviva Young Artist Program based in Montreal, Quebec. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks so much for having me. Nice to have you.

How a violin sounds all comes down to physics, right? It does. It's all about how acoustics function and how those sandwaves transfer and play in the resonating body of the instrument. And you translated that science into an instrument that can be 3D printed. Please, tell me, walk me through the process here. We are now about five years into this story. We started by asking this question about five years ago, well, if you can print a bone or a portal vein,

why can't we print a violin? And so I started working with an interdisciplinary team based in Ottawa. We developed instruments for use in the context of a symphony orchestra and to play concertos with the symphony orchestra. Our good friends at the Toledo Symphony Orchestra sort of took the baton from there and started to do some work in looking at whether you could recycle material

and use recycled plastic to make 3D instruments. And then most recently, the ball has come back to Canada and we've started to look at how we can make it more accessible using at-home 3D printers and less expensive materials like PLA. What is the model? What model do you use? How do you actually know what to print on the 3D printer? Well, we get our information from a whole bunch of different sources. So we started with a basic kind of violin shape. And then from there, we pulled the measurements from a strad from a strat various made in 1704. It's called the Betts strad. And you can actually have a look at it on the Library of Congress's website. So we pulled the measurements from that instrument and ran some printing tests, decided that we liked a lot. lot of it. And then we started to play with the curvature of the front and back of the instrument.

What we would say is the belly of the instrument. If you look at a violin, you see that it slants up and curves in the middle of the face of the instrument and the middle of the back. So we took some curvature measurements from a violin maker, a violin making family, I should say, who was working in Naples at about the same time as Strad, the Galliano family. We incorporated those. And that's how we got our most latest iteration. Do you have to manipulate the printing material so you get the exact shape and consistency that you want? We do. So a lot of that comes down to the sort of material you use and how it's printed. So in this case, we use polylactic acid, which comes in a great big reel. It looks like a big spool of yarn. And it gets fed into a printer that melts it and draws tiny little lines.

They're about 0.4 millimeters thick. And we manipulate that using a computer to print the violin with tiny little spaces that resonate in between. Those spaces are made in the shape of a square. So like a tiny little checkered board shape inside the instrument because that's what helps it to resonate best. Oh, so the square shape makes better sound. It does. There's actually been some really interesting research recently about plastic polymers and the various shapes, the internally printed shapes that sound best.

So a square pattern definitely sounds better than, for example, a honeycomb pattern or a star shape. Wow. So you must have printed a lot of violins before, a lot of trial and error here, before you got what you wanted. Indeed. And there have been some really great flocks along the way. Things that have sounded like tin cans, the most recent ended up looking a little. little bit like a mound of pink spaghetti in the middle of my 3D printer. There are lots of different versions of trial and error. Wow. And so what's the design that you ended up with? And how much does it cost? So the current design is made all in PLA. It's in two parts that fit together. So a child size instrument, a fractional size instrument, costs about $7 U.S. dollars to print.

Wow. Wow. And the goal, of course, in printing this is to make violins that people can afford to practice on and using schools? Absolutely. And can be recycled when they're done. I hadn't thought about that. Now, let's get to the all-important question, you know, sort of a drum-roll moment. What about the sound? Mary Elizabeth, can you play both violins, your beautiful, old Italian one and the one you made for seven bucks and see if I can guess which one is made of plastic? Okay. Option number one. Okay, that was option number one. Here's number two. beautiful beautiful okay iara what do you think oh my goodness i have no idea if i had to guess i would just guess the first one was the older violin and the second one was the 3D printed one you are right

but but there was so close it was just a guess you're right um and so the difference here being that probably less about how it sounds and more about how it feels to play. You know, they feel a little bit different that way. But they're hard to tell the part. You're the first person who's been able to guess that one, right? Well, it was just a guess. You know, I could tell in the second one, it seemed like it was a little more difficult to play from the way I heard it.

You know, I never played a violin in my life, so I could not tell. but to a trained musician like yourself, what is the difference? Is it just the difficulty? Because the sound was excellent. Well, so it's exactly the same piece of music. And if anyone is curious about what that is, that's a piece of music called The Meditation, and it's from an opera called Taiz. The playing is a lot about physics.

And it's about how we take horsehair, so that's what stretched across the bow, and how we rub it against metal, and then that transfers into the body of the instrument. And so a skillful violin player is able to do a number of things with the bow. So we will adjust the rate of speed at which the hair travels across the string and how much pressure we use to sort of rub the hair across the street, so how much friction we create.

And where between the bridge and the beginning of the fingerboard, the contact point that we use. So those are the three kind of basic factors that are involved in violin playing or in sound production, I should say. And so on a 3D printed instrument, we have to use substantially less weight and a little bit more speed of the bow to help to kind of draw out this sound, as opposed to my Italian instrument, which is sort of like, you know, opening up a wonderful painter's palette full of color. I imagine wood, especially beautiful old wood, sounds very different from plastic, right? How did you

account for that difference? So wood is porous. And one of the considerations that we needed to account for was the fact that plastic is not. And so when we talk about this relationship between wood and plastic, we come back to that research about the internally printed spaces, whether they're square shaped or star-shaped, within the printed PLA. So that gives us a degree of flexibility, a degree of space and air pockets in the material that gets sort of as close as we could to printing what would be the equivalent of wood. We go back to the idea of total flops. there are PLA spools that are composites of polylactic acid and bamboo.

And that was another disaster where it was not strong enough to withhold the weight of the bridge. So we had a great big hole in the middle of an instrument that was not so good either. Yeah, I hate it when that happens. I know. That's really interesting. that's part of the discovery process. But as you say, the point of your 3D printing is not to make a comparable instrument as much as it is to make a serviceable one that new players, amateurs can learn on, right? Exactly. And I'm very fortunate that I have been able to play on this very fine Italian instrument for quite a long time. It's a real joy to play on.

But a beginning violinist doesn't need that. And the goal of this has never been to replace or replicate that. The goal has been to create an instrument that is easy to maintain, that's durable, and that gives people a really easy access point to music education. Yes. So what does it mean to you then as a violinist and educator to be able to make something that can end up in children's hands? You know, I've been very, very lucky. You know, I will go and lead a rehearsal for a production of Puccini's opera Laboam later today. This is, I live my life in this wonderful sea of beautiful music. But had I not done that, had I done something else with my life, the very serious musical education that I had would have served me well in so many ways.

And I think that it is a wonderful opportunity for young people to learn everything for, everything for, from focus and discipline to setting and hitting goals, to working well with other people as we play together in the orchestra or in chamber music, there are just so many things that we learn. And so if I can, in some way, help more young people to come to that, I think that would be a wonderful thing. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. If you're just joining us, I'm talking with Dr. Mary Elizabeth Brown,

a concert violinist who is designing 3D printed violins for kids. When can we expect these violins to be made widely available? I mean, will it be a day where I can take, you know, the design and put it into my own 3D printer and make a violin? Well, that's really the idea. And at the moment, we are in the final stages, the final iterations. As somebody who is a professional violinist and a teacher, I would like to. to make sure that it has my stamp of approval on every element of it before we start our beta testing, which we hope to start later in the spring of this year,

and hopefully we'll have these out and available by the end of 2023. Now, I know the 3D printed instruments have been made before. So what makes your violin different from other models? That's a good question. I think the main difference is that we have real, really dug into the disciplines of physics and acoustics and violin making. And we've involved researchers from all around the world in this process. I think also coming to this as a professional musician,

coming to this as somebody who plays on a very fine instrument, and looking for the closest possible sound in that gives us a different sort of view or helps us to see that or hear that through a different lens. I think lastly, most of this is about finding fractional size instruments. Most of the instruments that people are printing these days are for adults. But ideally, we start children when they're quite young. So we have been printing 10th and 16th size instruments, which are small enough for the average 6-year-old.

So you really went above and beyond to make this super easy for kids. kids to use. Yeah. One of the big things that's different about this model of instrument is that the bridge and the soundpost are printed in. So nothing on a violin on a regular violin is glued. So everything's held in place by tension. And that means that if you need to have anything done, you really need to go and see a lutee to do that for you. And the inspiration from this came from one of my dear students who lives on a sailboat off the coast of New Zealand and plays the violin very well. And her bridge started to warp as they were starting a sort of two-week sail where they would not, you know, come to port. And so her mom and I sort of cowboy steaming a bridge using boat repair tools and a clamp and a tea kettle.

Lots of MacGyvering here. We really did MacGyver this. And it really got me thinking. you know, we're going to put, it's one thing to put instruments into the hands of young people. It's another thing to then sort of saddle them with the cost of continued maintenance and having continued repairs and other things. So a lot of this last iteration, especially with the little instruments, had to do with printing in the bridge and the soundpost so that there would be limited, MacGyvering needed wherever they ended up.

Do you have to paint it to look like a violin? I mean, does it come out? It must come out in a multitude of colors. Well, the one that I play to you today is white. But I have pink iridescent thermoplastic filament in my printer at the moment. So the next one that gets printed is going to be a sort of fuchsia color. So it can come in any kind of color you like. Well, I would imagine that's a plus when you're introducing kids.

to violins, it looks kind of cool, right? It doesn't look scary. Exactly. I had a student just this morning who's eight, who said, you know, hey, Miss Mary Beth, which is what they've called me for like the last 20 years. You know, hey, Miss Mary Beth, could you print me a blue one? I think I might play more scales if it were blue. That's a great anecdote. Well, thank you. Thank you, Mary Beth for taking time to be with us today. My pleasure. Thanks so much for having me. Yes, and good luck to you. Dr. Mary Elizabeth Brown is a concerted violin. and the founder and director of the Aviva Young Artist Program based in Montreal, Quebec. And that's about it for this hour.

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