Making sound tangible by three-D printers and giant-Fourier transform

Recent advances in computational power and 3-D printing offer new opportunities to make fundamental acoustic principles tangible for students. In an age of AI, living knowledge founded by nurturing intuitive understanding through physical experience is a vital educational goal. This presentation introduces methods for “making sound tangible” to achieve this. We demonstrate 3-D-printed loudspeaker systems and headphone adapters that enable students to experience and feel the vibrations and changes in sounds interactively in real-time. These interactions connect the tactile experience to changes in sound radiation, propagation, interference, and resonance. To bridge the gap between experience and acoustics, we also introduce interactive, real-time software tools for sound acquisition, modification, reproduction, and visualization. These tools utilize an underlying concept termed “giant-FFT SRC” (Fast Fourier Transform-based Sampling Rate Conversion, Välimäki and Bilbao, J. AES, 2023). The concept is simple, but it has only become practical with considerable advances in computational power and algorithms, which is now more than a billion times faster than it was half a century ago. The 3-D models and software tools are available as open-source resources. JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP23K20440 supported this work.