Sight of sound at the Utah Arts Festival.

• Author: Sasich, Chris
• Position: Around Utah

Salt Lake City--If you were among the crowds at this summer's Utah Arts Festival, you may have noticed the striking woodwork of CHALLIS CUSTOMS. For the past year and a half, Don Challls has taken his prior decades of woodwork and wood carving in a new direction: sound. Sharp vertical lines rise out of the wood to form a unique body, a visual representation of a sound wave.

"Everything we do is custom made for each person that orders. It could be a clip from a voice mail that's meaningful to you, maybe from a loved one that's passed. You can use your voice or somebody else's voice, music--anything you want, really. Any sound," said Challis. "So we take that, we put it into an audio-editing software, and that gives us the wave form and I print that out on a large scale, to where I want that to be, then I use that as a template to cut with my miter saw. I'm making individual cuts to create the full shape."

Challis has been creating wooden carvings of sound waves for a year and a half. It started with a memorial piece where "I love ya'" was isolated from a voicemail left by a loved one who had passed. No two pieces are alike...