Music-lover Roman Plaghki is a design engineer at 3D printing company Materialise. Tasked with developing customized offerings for their automotive clients, Plaghki and his team began looking at using Materialise's technology to produce 3D-printed speaker covers. But rather than designing arbitrary grids, they wanted to leverage technology to inform the design.

By using computers to visualize the waveforms generated by specific songs, the team was able to translate those values—amplitude, frequency, beat, pitch, tone, etc.--into a design language.

This took a lot of "fine-tuning what it meant to visualize a song," they write, "how to best personalize the speaker grill with 3D printing, and how to make it an attractive yet feasible product. This took hours of creating algorithms, dissecting what makes each song unique, and collaboration among the team."

"With unlimited texture and pattern options, end-users can choose both the song they want on display in their car and the exact look that represents their style."

Here's Plaghki demonstrating their process:

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