The most cutting edge 3D-printer technology has been used to solve a 2,000-year-old musical mystery.
Billy Ó Foghlú, an Irish PhD student at the Australian National University of Asia Pacific, has revealed that an Iron Age artefact, which had long been presumed to be part of a spear-end, may actually have been used as a part of a mouthpiece for a musical instrument.
Using a 3D printer, Ó Foghlú reproduced an exact copy of the piece, which he then attached to an Iron Age Irish horn, with the addition lending the instrument a richer musical tone.
“Suddenly the instrument came to life,” said Ó Foghlú. “These horns were not just hunting horns or noisemakers. They were very carefully constructed and repaired, they were played for hours. Music clearly had a very significant role in the culture.”
Horn instruments from the Bronze and Iron ages are not uncommon discoveries around Europe, particularly in Nordic countries. But a dearth of mouthpieces in Ireland has suggested to historians that the Irish music scene has drifted into a musical dark age, the ANU says.
Ó Foghlú wanted to prove the existence of these musical mouthpieces in his native Ireland, and set about making an exact 3D replica of the “Conical Spearbutt of Navan,” an Iron-Age relic discovered in Co Meath in the early 20th century.
Unable to access the real relic, Ó Foghlú was able to used 3D scanning to replicate the perfect model, which when added to a horn instrument offered “greater comfort and control to ancient horn players, and may have increased the range of their instruments.”
The scarcity of these mouthpieces in Ireland is, Ó Foghlú suggests, potentially linked to the practice of dismantling musical instruments when their players passed away.
"A number of instruments have been found buried in bogs. The ritual killing of an instrument and depositing it in a burial site shows the full significance of it in the culture," he said.
"Tutankhamen also had trumpets buried with him in Egypt. Contemporary horns were also buried in Scandinavia, Scotland and mainland Europe: they all had integral mouthpieces too."
(H/T: Irish Archaeology)
