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SINCE THE 1500s, artisans known as luthiers have been making violins by hand. With saws, chisels, planes, calipers, and a keen eye as tools, a luthier spends dozens of hours sweating the details of every line and every curve in each piece of wood. But the transparent plastic violin pictured in the foreground-being played in January at the TCT Japan 2020 expo in Tokyo-took shape inside a 3D printer. The instrument, produced by the Tokyo Metropolitan Industrial Technology Research Institute, owes its form, fit, and symmetry to computerized scans of a wooden instrument. Those blueprints guided the machine as it went through the additive manufacturing process whereby layer after layer of resin is built up-a far cry from the painstaking sculpting process that luthiers have used for centuries.