Waveform Necklace & Bracelet

by bzabiz

364K43528

Intro: Waveform Necklace & Bracelet

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.
Now 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

25 Comments

Shaunyz 4 years ago

The sound waves jewelry. How are you able to hear what the Soundwave said

bzabiz 4 years ago

You are not unfortunately. The soundwave only describes the amplitude. Due to the simplified design the frequency isn’t capture and can’t be decided to sound again.

Burak BahtiyarA 7 years ago

hi david

How can I make that stencil design for the laser cut? with all the arrows and unions

i cant do it. i am search but not find

bzabiz 7 years ago

Hi Burak,

I made it with Rhino 3d.
You can also use Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape which is open source.
It's a lot of manual work with splitting lines and stuff.
You need to become familiar with any kind of vector editing software.
But ones you get the basics it's not that hard to do...

palfrey 7 years ago

I had a lot of difficulties trying to figure out how to use Audacity for this, and ended up writing some code to do it for me. There's a blog post on how I did this at http://www.lshift.net/blog/2015/09/06/waveform-necklace-as-a-service/ and a website I made that'll help others make the files https://waveform-necklace.herokuapp.com/

bzabiz 7 years ago

Hey Palfrey.
That's pretty awesome.
Should have hired you as a developer long time ago ;)
Would have saved a lot of work.
I'll add your link to the tutorial. Very nicely done!

MikeS288 8 years ago

How can I make that stencil design for the laser cut? with all the arrows and unions

bzabiz 8 years ago

I replied to your PM already.
Describing in detail how to use Illustrator is out of the scope of this guide. You will draw the shapes and use "pathfinder" to combine them. However you wont need them. Arranging the individual beads will do. Breaking pieces out from the stencil leaves sharp edges anyways, why I discontinued this design...

thatgirloverthere 8 years ago

Can we just use air dry clay for beads and ukelele strings for the string?

bzabiz 8 years ago

I guess so. Kinda laborious to make all the clay beads, but if you want to invest that time it should work well (Haven't logged in here for a while why my answer appears with a delay of 8 months ;))

bzabiz 9 years ago

you need to have them lasecut. there was also a guy who made an openscad version to 3d print these http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:60020

bzabiz 10 years ago

works for me, but just uploaded everything to my server again: http://data.bza.biz/instructables.zip

Pfarmkid 10 years ago

I saw once someone recorded there now wife saying Yes when he proposed then made her a necklace with the waveform of it. Thought it would be a cool idea for someone on here.

mbluetyphoon 11 years ago

Buttons would work too, plus buttons are as colorful as you would want them.

imajem 11 years ago

This audacity won't work on my computer....is there something else that will work with win7??? 64 bit machine???

bzabiz 11 years ago

same configuration here, audacity works.
you can use any audio editor.
audacity is just the best open source choice.

lswett1 11 years ago

So...does everyone but me have a $3000 to $5000 laser cutter lying around?  I love the idea but when I research the laser cutter, $$$ is all I can find.
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