Hadestown train whistle

A four-tone steam train whistle, carefully tested and refined to be simple to print, and to blow easily and clearly. As a stopped pipe, it sounds nice and low but is only about 200mm long.

The pitches are matched to the soundtrack of Hadestown (B/C♯/E/G; but see pedantic musical details below). Demo can be heard at:

https://supperware.net/downloads/hadestown-whistle.mp3

As a full disclosure, the second picture reveals what I went through in the process of tuning and refinement.

Printing

• You might prefer to print this vertically with the mouthpiece against the bed and using the slicer's default brim. This will take about an hour longer than the horizontal print shown in the .3mf file. The instrument works just as well and you may prefer the texture. Apart from that, the advantage is that the bridges will print more cleanly.
• On enclosed printers, turn down the part cooling if you're printing horizontally. The default profile likes to blast air to solidify bridges and overhangs quickly, but large areas of bridge (as we have here) work better without a breeze.
• No support should be used in either orientation.
• This design is compatible with an A1 mini if you rotate the .3mf on the bed by 45 degrees.
• Example in photograph is Sunlu PLA/wood filament (maple flavour) printed horizontally. Standard PLA works well too.
• Your lips are fragile. If your printer leaves sharp edges on the mouthpiece (from a brim or using stringy material), sand these off before you test it.

Pedantic Musical Details

The Hadestown soundtrack actually uses a five-tone whistle. If you are a Hadestown fan, are gasping to play the Urtext version of the pipes and are really, really bothered by these discrepancies, here they are listed:

• The bottom pipe in their whistle, which sounds about an octave lower than the top pipe, has been omitted.
• The soundtrack whistle uses fatter pipes, which makes the air column less stable, which is why the pitch changes with volume. Quite a nice effect, but I didn't want to make the print take all day and quadruple the weight of the thing.
• Their whistle is out of tune. It was hard to work this out from the soundtrack because its pitch never stays still. I approximated to the musical scale, transcribing the notes by ear to make this whistle. But, from spectral analysis, the notes to the nearest quarter-tone are G♯+50c/A♯+50c/C♯/E/G+50c. Bluesy!