How to create a soundwave picture..................

So Marta in our office created some nice picture for my wife and I of our names as a soundwave.  We liked it so we asked her to write how she did it , so we could share with you.

First of all you need to record the name, sentence or whatever you want to print with a recording device.  For this picture we used our phones, and quality was good enough, just need some post production to make it look nice.

Now is time to download the proper software to transform our audio file into a wave shape vector and modify it in Illustrator. The best software I’ve found so far is praat, it allows exporting the wave into an EPS file and it is free.
First, go Open > Read from file; and choose the file you want to illustrate. Now in the object menu we have loaded our sound Casalina.

 

Now placing the mouse in the upper left corner of the Praat picture menu we press and drag to make the pink square bigger. Next select your sound from the object menu and select DRAW, it will pop up a menu, just select ok and our wave will appear in the picture menu within the pink square.

Now, from the picture menu go File > Save it as an EPS.
Done!

Now is time to modify it in Illustrator to make it look better.

First we need to delete the axis and numbers that we don’t want and “clean” the wave.
To remove the aggressive corners there is two options.
One is changing the corner shape from miter to round in the stroke menu

The other option is simplifying the path, but you might get some funny shape depending on your original wave.  Object > path >simplify. And play with the percentage of  the curve precision.

In this case we used the first option.
Now change the stroke weight to 0,25 pt. to get a more defined shape.  If you have CS6 or CC version you can apply a gradient to the stroke.
Go to the Gradient menu and set up three markers located in the 0%,50% and 100% using a darker colour in 0 and 100% and a lighter one in 50 %

The wave now is too thin and not so clear. To make it more visible we will apply the same gradient to the fill of the wave.

The wave is more visual but it looks discontinuous. To make our wave more continuous we select our wave: Right click and Reflect > horizontal, Instead of OK we select copy. Now we have our wave mirrored. We place the new mirrored wave aligned with the original, Right click and Scale > Vertical  and scale it to 40%. In that way we fill the gaps in our wave, but we don’t affect the general outline of our wave.

Finally, we choose a nice font and write the name or sentence we have drawn. Here we used Montserrat in capitals and added some dashes as a final touch.
Tará!