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Inspired by The Sound Advice Project, the sound bracelet is a memorable gift to give to your friends and loved ones. Essentially, the sound bracelet is a bracelet in the form of a sound wave. The original project allowed users to submit a 6-second voice recording and for $18, get their voice turned into a sound wave. It was a personal and simple gift.
With that in mind, I set out to make my own, gathering materials that were readily available around the house. You can customize the bracelet to your own voice, making every one truly unique. Your messages can be anything, from a touching "I love you" to a simple "Congratulations." It is a very easy way to make a nice gift for someone.
With that in mind, I set out to make my own, gathering materials that were readily available around the house. You can customize the bracelet to your own voice, making every one truly unique. Your messages can be anything, from a touching "I love you" to a simple "Congratulations." It is a very easy way to make a nice gift for someone.
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Signing UpStep 1Materials
Most of the supplies for the sound bracelet can be found around the house. You'll also need some basic computer skills.
- Computer with microphone
- Audacity
- Screen capture software (On Windows, you can use the default "print screen" button. For Macs, press the Apple key + Shift + 3 and release all at the same time. Then, click on the screen with your mouse.)
- Microsoft Word or an image editing software
- Printer
- Hot glue gun
- Ruler
- Scissors (optional)
- Colored Paper (optional)
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That's true of this project, and also the disc-bead style bracelets/necklaces that inspired it. See:
http://jewelry.productaday.com/necklace.html
http://www.thesoundadviceproject.com/
The reason why you can't play it back is poor spatial resolution; i.e. these methods destroy all the high frequency information. So even if you tried to play it back, all you'd get is blub-blub-blub.
In case you or anyone else might be interested in making a bracelet that does support playback, the equations below give some insight into how this could work.
Suppose you have a bracelet of length L, encoding Tt seconds of sound. Moreover assume the encoding is done with N discrete samples, so that:
The sample period, or one over the sample frequency, is:
Ts = 1/fs = Tt/N
The spatial resolution, the length (in inches, mm, etc) of each sample is
a = 1/α = L/N
Finally, the speed at which you have to move the reader over the bracelet is
v = L/Tt = a/Ts = a fs
So the total time available for the sound sample on the bracelet is:
Tt = L/(a fs) = (L α)/fs
As an example, suppose you have a bracelet with length L = 10 inches, printed at 400 dpi (dots per inch), with a sample frequency of 4000 Hz. This gives a total time of:
(10 inch)*(400 dpi) / (4000 s-1) = 1 s
So that's 1s of pretty low quality sound. The next problem is building a reader capable of resolving tiny 400 dpi printing.
For an idea of what this might look like, imagine a section of old projector-film rolled into a bracelet sized loop. Just the part with the sound track is necessary.
Picture taken from :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:USN16mmSoundtrack.jpg