Simian honored in Germany
Basel musician Ricardo Simian has historical instruments printed on a 3D printer
and wins a major technology award. He prevails against competitors such as Adidas and Siemens.
At the world's leading trade fair for additive manufacturing, Formnext, in Frankfurt, where Simian was honored, the 34 finalists from England, Belgium, Poland, Switzerland, Singapore, the USA, France, Canada, China and Germany included designers, start-ups and universities as well as clinics and renowned industrial companies.
In an Austrian museum, the musician from Basel found a catalog with precise measurements of the original instruments. He now has them scanned in computer tomography in clinics and thus obtains a true-to-original template for printing. The instrument is then built up layer by layer using high-precision machines. The old, handmade instruments and the printed instruments can hardly be distinguished from each other in terms of sound.
The pursuit of the sounds of early music, especially the cornett, brought Ricardo
Simian away from his native city of Santiago, to Milan in Italy and finally to
Basel in Switzerland, where he obtained a diploma in early music and recorder (at the Civica Scuola
di Musica di Milano) and a Master in Zinc (at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensi)
reached.
He performs, teaches, researches and expands his sound possibilities by learning and developing the recently discovered old instruments tenorzink, cornettino and the slide trumpet, as any musician of the time from which the instruments originated would have done. In 2019, an ensemble that plays exclusively with historical instruments from the 3D printer will perform at the International Music Festival Alpentöne for the first time.
