A voice message gift: a recording you kept, drawn as a soundwave

A personalised soundwave print of a three-word recording drawn as bold teal bars, with the words set large beneath

Most phones hold at least one recording someone wouldn't want to lose: a child's first proper sentence, a voicemail from a grandparent, a friend singing happy birthday badly. The soundwave print turns that recording into a picture of its shape, with the words beneath in quotes, and who said them and when. It doesn't play anything; it is a print of the sound, not a speaker.

Getting the recording off the phone

The print takes the kinds of file phones usually make, m4a, mp3, wav, ogg or webm, up to ten minutes long. Menus vary a little between app versions, but the usual routes are:

  • A WhatsApp voice note on an iPhone: press and hold the note, tap Forward, then the share button, and choose Save to Files.
  • A WhatsApp voice note on Android: press and hold the note, then use Share to save it to your files or to Drive.
  • An iPhone voicemail: open it in the Voicemail tab of the Phone app and use the share button to save it to Files.
  • A voice memo: the Voice Memos app shares an m4a file directly. The sound from a video works too, once saved as an audio file.

WhatsApp keeps voice notes as .opus files. If one won't open on the design page, convert it to mp3 and try again.

The recording stays with you

That matters most when the voice belongs to someone who has died. Your browser reads the recording and keeps only the shape of the wave, a few hundred numbers. The audio itself is never uploaded to us and nothing of it is stored. Once the design is saved, the wave is kept with it, so you won't need the recording again to order another copy.

The words

Nothing is transcribed, so the words are yours to type: the whole message if it is short, or just the line that matters. You can also leave the words off and let the wave stand alone with a name and a date. The silence at each end is trimmed and the loudest moment becomes the tallest bar, so a short message still fills the sheet; one of our examples is a voicemail of 25 seconds.

Four ways to draw it

Classic bars mirrored about a centre line; one filled outline, like a tide; bars fanned round a ring; or a thin pulse on a hairline, like a monitor trace. The words can go below, above or nowhere, and you choose the colours, the paper and the lettering. The wave is drawn as vector, so it stays sharp at 60 x 90 cm.

If the words were never recorded, the vows print or the certificate print put words on paper instead. The print is made to order in the UK after you approve it; if it is for Christmas, check the delivery estimate on the product page first.

For a partner who lives a long way off, our long distance relationship gift page pairs a voice note with a map of both towns.