Introduction: Waveform Necklace & Bracelet

About: ^_^ Hello my friend ^_^

Get an unique necklace or bracelet, by recording your voice!
The design of this necklace is generated from any kind of audio sample, its shape represents the audios waveform.
Send a love message, record the first words of your child, use the hook of your favourite song - it's up to you.

Check my website and Facebook to see how it can look like.
I'm selling them there as well in case you don't want to make it on your own.

Update:
I had some people asking for help commercializing this project.
I am still selling these necklaces/bracelets and I would prefer to stay the only provider.
This tutorial was made to enable people to make these if they can't afford mine,
they want further customization or just for their fun of making a DIY project.
Build as many as you want for all your friends and family.
I'm just asking you not to make money with this idea. Thanks!


Update 2:

User "palfrey" made a pretty nice tool that saves you 80% of all the work in this tutorial:
https://waveform-necklace.herokuapp.com/
If you want to save all of the work you can order the readymade piece from my website:
https://soundwave.love

Step 1: Download the Software

You will need the following software to create your necklace:

- an audio editor like Audacity (free)

- an image editor like Photoshop (trial will do) or GIMP (free)

- a vector or CAD editor like Illustrator (trial) or Inkscape (free) as a productdesigner I like Rhino3d

you can have the necklace produced by a local vendor or an online service like ponoko.com

Step 2: Record Your Voice and Take a Screenshot of the Waveform

Record your voice or open an audio clip.
You can record your voice within Audacity by pressing the record button.
If you have your file already, open it with audacity.
If you want to use a mp3 file, keep in mind Audacity doesn't support mp3 natively -
you need to download the LAME encoder plugin.
N
ow choose the part you want to use (I guess you are familiar with play buttons).
When you decided for a part, scale (see the arrows) the wave so it's big. 
Now take a screenshot of the wave
(mac user do it like this, windows users like that, linux users are nerdy enough to know how this works)

Step 3: Create the Beads

Either you go the easy way and download the ones I prepared, or you draw them yourself.
First you have to make some decisions:

- How thick will the string be you are going to use?
- How many different bead sizes you want to use (We'll use 12 here)?
- How big should the biggest disc be?

Let's say our string is 2mm, so we use an inner diameter of 2.5mm which stays the same for all beads.
We'll start with an outer diameter of 5mm an will increase in 1.5mm steps so the biggest disc will have a diameter of 21.5 mm.
You can choose these values

Select the ellipse tool and make sure paths are not filled.
Now hold the alt key and click somewhere on the artboard. 
You'll be able to enter numeric values now. we use 2.5 x 2.5mm 
Then we do this step again using a value of 5mm and this time when clicking on the artboard will click in the center
of the circle we drew previously. Smart guides will guide us.
Make sure to enable them or click accurately.
So we got our first bead. let's continue until we have 12 (or how many different sizes you like to have)

Step 4: Stencil

Now we open our screenshot we took from Audacity in our photo editor and overlay it with a stencil.
You can create this stencil yourself or just download mine.
 
Scale the stencil so the first row starts in the middle of your wave
and the first and last column match the beginning and end of your wave.

This stencil has 80 columns. If you use a material of 1mm thickness, your necklace will have a lentgh of 8cm. Easy math. So calculate how thick your material is, how long you want your necklace to be and start calculating how mani columns you'll have to use.


Step 5: Counting

Now comes the boring part. Start counting. Check for each column in which row the peak of the wave is.
Start writing down these numbers. They'll tell you in which order you have to thread the beads onto your string.

In this case we would start with 1,1,1,3,5,10 and so on...



Step 6:

Now we have to prepare the cutting pattern to send to our laser vendor.
There are 2 ways of doing this.
Take your notes from the last step and start counting again.
This time we'll count how many beads of each size are required for the necklace.
Then we start copying them in Illustrator until we have enough
(Drag the individual beads by holding down the ALT key,
after you copyied the first one you can copy the others by pressin CTRL+D)
Make a few more of the small sizes in case you should loose some.
If you'll assemble it yourself you dont have to align the beads in the correct order,
but you might consider to do this if you plan to make this a present (see picture attached)

General considerations:
The thinner the beads are, the more accurate the representation of the wave will be.
Depending on the look you want to achieve: The thinner the better, but don't get to thin otherwise the discs can break easily.
Acrylic is fine, but you have to peel of the protective sheet from each individual bead.
It's a pain in the ass. You wont have to do this with wood.
Silver looks good, but it's really expensive.

So, have fun and share your results with me -> www.facebook.com/bza.biz

Cheers,

David

www.bza.biz