A 3,000 Year Old Egyptian Mummy “Speaks” After His Vocal Chords Are 3D Printed #archeology #3Dprinting

It’s not much, “a bit like a long, exasperated meh without the m,” but how amazing is it that scientists managed to 3D scan and print the vocal chords of a 3,000 year old mummified Egyptian priest and used them to produce a sound?

Howard is also hoping to conduct a second stage of research on Nesyamun’s vocal tract that could result in reproducing the sound of him singing as he would have done in his role as a scribe and priest during the reign of Pharaoh Ramses XI. His voice was an essential part of his ritual duties, which involved speaking, chanting and singing.

According to Howard, the team’s Egyptian scholars said the phonetics and the music of the songs were known, so “in principle we could make him make different sounds and we could start to reproduce bits of what he actually sang.” To do that, Howard said he would use computer software to build up the tongue based on the average for a vocal tract of that size.

Read the rest on the CNN website.