Digital and Handcrafting Processes Applied to Sound-Studies of Archaeological Bone Flutes

Bone flutes make use of a naturally hollow raw-material. As nature does not produce duplicates, each bone has its own inner cavity, and thus its own sound-potential. This morphological variation implies acoustical specificities, thus making it impossible to handcraft a true and exact sound-replica in another bone. This phenomenon has been observed in a handcrafting context and has led us to conduct two series of experiments (the first-one using handcrafting process, the second-one using 3D process) in order to investigate its exact influence on acoustics as well as on sound-interpretation based on replicas. The comparison of the results has shed light upon epistemological and methodological issues that have yet to be fully understood. This work contributes to assessing the application of digitization, 3D printing and handcrafting to flute-like sound instruments studied in the field of archaeomusicology.