Amanda Ghassaei, creator of the 3-D printed record, is at it again, this time with lasers.

Diverting from additive manufacturing to subtractive, Ghassaei etched tracks on another medium – wood – using a 120-watt Epilog Legend EXT laser cutter. The strains of Radiohead's "Idioteque" and The Velvet Underground's "Sunday Morning" are easily recognizable, but infused with an almost electric whine, a strange sound to hear emanating from a piece of wood.

Ghassaei is a software engineer at Instructables, so she naturally published a how-to on the DIY site. And while the 3-D printed records required some fairly prohibitive technology, part of her motivation for this project was to make a record using slightly more common equipment. She also turned the laser cutter loose on thick paper and acrylic for LP, to varying degrees of success. She reports that the process to inscribe a full song takes about 90 minutes, ten longer than her 3-D printed discs.

"For me, the most interesting part of publishing these projects is to see where other people take them, and the 3-D printed records were just a little too difficult for an average person to experiment with," she says. "I'm hoping that people will download my code and make their own records, or make something I haven't even thought of yet."

To create the vector graphics she used in the laser cutter, Ghassaei used a digital waveform file, converted into a PDF. Because the needle on a record player picks up vibrations based on the shape the surface, the waveform translates almost directly into the shape of the song once Ghassaei spiraled it around the wooden plate. Because the resolution of the laser is not as fine as vinyl record presses, each groove takes up at least ten times the space of its vinyl associate. At this resolution – with a sampling rate of 4.5 KHz, or around a tenth of an MP3 – one side of an album runs about three minutes. Because laser cutter files are two dimensional, they're much less data intense than 3-D printer files, enough so that Ghassaei was able to embed whole (or almost whole) songs. But as the needle spirals inward, the song becomes more and more distorted as the sampling rate decreases, fading into a scratchy blur.

"Some songs are better suited for this process, songs that are very full in the lower to mid range, but also very sparse overall are best," she says. "Idioteque was a great example of this, it has very strong low to mid tones with minimal backing synthetic drums."

We can debate the merits of plywood versus maple (Ghassaei says they sound about the same, though plywood warps more), but either way, they're visually stunning, a new take on tree rings.

"What I really want to do next is get some 12" wood rounds, the kind with a live, rough edge and cut some records right into the rings of the tree," Ghassaei says.

Radiohead - Idioteque - Laser Cut Wood Record from Amanda Ghassaei on Vimeo.