3D Printing Helps Recreate Voice of 3,000-Year-Old Mummy

(Courtesy Leeds Museums and Galleries)

A team of researchers in Leeds have recreated the exact vocal sound of an Egyptian priest who has been dead for 3,000 years.

As Nature reports, it's impossible to recreate the voice of an individual unless you have access to their soft tissue. Synthesizing a voice requires the "precise dimensions of an individual's vocal tract," because they "produce a sound unique to them." In other words, if someone has been dead a long time you're not going to succeed, unless of course their soft tissue has been preserved.

As the Twitter thread by Leeds Museums & Galleries below reveals, an electronic engineer, archaeologist, Egyptologist, museum curator, clinical scientist, and an archaeological scientist got extremely lucky when it was discovered the mummified remains of Egyptian priest Nesyamun contained a perfectly intact larynx.

We're about to tell you an incredible story. One we've been keeping under our hats for 7 whole years.

It's the story of how we heard the voice of our Egyptian mummy Nesyamun for the first time in over 3000 years.

? HOLD ON TO YOUR HATS ? pic.twitter.com/iLsJcN8Hl6

— Leeds Museums & Galleries (@LeedsMuseums) January 23, 2020

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3D Printing: What You Need to Know

The research team used a Computed Tomography (CT) scanner to capture the precise dimensions of Nesyamun's vocal tract and 3D print a reproduction. Scientific American points out the researchers added a "coupling cylinder" at the larynx so it could easily be connected to a speaker for inputting a larynx sound. The speaker then acts as both the lungs and vocal folds.

By producing an approximate adult-pitched sound and feeding it into the 3D-printed vocal tract, it produces a vowel sound somewhere in between an "e" and an "a" in Nesyamun's voice. The end result is a nine-second recording, which you can listen to on YouTube and below.