"President Obama gave his speech on 12 February of this year, and the very next day I was already working on the sound." Gilles Azzaro is talking about Barack Obama's State of the Union address in which he said the "next revolution in manufacturing is Made in America" and will be driven by hubs that master techniques such as 3D printing. Azzaro is a product of just such hubs, working closely with the Toulouse FabLabArtilect on his 3D visualisations of sound. So as a self-described voice sculptor ("I transform invisible and intangible recordings into something solid and tangible") he immediately wanted to 3D-print that speech, or at least a 39 second snippet of it. 

"It meant something to me when I heard it for the first time," he told Wired.co.uk. Those hubs are to Azzaro the heart and soul of the industry, nurturing talent and welcoming in novices with new perspectives. "They are places where knowledge can be exchanged, ordinary workshops fitted out with the latest in digital technology which costs so much only industry can usually access it."

His sculpture, which took 350 hours to print, signifies what that kind of hub can produce, and what a material revolution could look like. "It reveals the invisible," Azzaro tells Wired.co.uk, "a new digital concept, and also the content and value of a message that makes sense and is optimistic for the future."

Made using a small 3D desktop printer, the finished product is as rich as any tapestry, built upwards and across in matte black mountain-like peaks and troughs representing the ebb and flow of Obama's rousing intonations. Converting the sound into a 3D image took Azzaro five hours. "Even my super-powerful computer kept crashing. Towards the end I felt I was nearing a breakdown! Transforming 39 seconds of sound into a 3D representation represents literally millions of data."

Azzaro designed the programming software himself, having first had the idea to convert audio files to 3D images in 1993. Completed in 2006, it's now patented and "involves digitally rebuilding in 3D all the parameters of a sound".

"The image of the sound in 3D is faithfully reproduced and extremely precise -- hence the term voiceprint. This part of the work in purely mathematical, the artistic work can then begin."

The piece measures 1.52m-long, but since he was using a desktop printer Azzaro had to do it in bits. Those 12 parts are made up of a total 10kg of filament that the artist purposefully produced using a wide nozzle to get the topographical-style finish. 

"When you look at it closely you get the impression you are looking at a mountain range or lunar landscape. The choice of using matte black and thick printing brings out the grooves like on an old record, which again underlines the visual side of an audio recording. The green laser beam that passes over the recording highlights the beauty of the soundscape." 

That laser shows a viewer which part of the speech they are hearing, and is instigated by a motion sensor -- which he explained as "an invisible connection revealing the invisible message". The tubelike container it sits in was created by designer Patrick Sarran. "I felt this groundbreaking speech should be like a message in a bottle," says Azzaro.

The speech was groundbreaking, because it made the idea that 3D printing is a revolution mainstream. While some have been following the technology's progress closely for years, it's likely the general public best know it for helping a self-proclaimed anarchist bring the 3D printed gun to the world. Obama was reiterating what the rest of us knew already -- that technologies like 3D printing spell a revolution in manufacturing that can help anyone be an innovator. 

Azzaro describes the Toulose hub as somewhere "where there is always someone ready to lend a hand whether to make a table or a rocket". These hubs represent the collaborative nature of future design. We've all been told multidisciplinary research will open up great new avenues, but at FabLabArtilect and labs like it across the globe that's happening now. "Computer experts, robotics, electronics, mechanics, aeronautics specialists all work together alongside the occasional curious onlooker, who is also just as likely to come up with an idea or the best solution to help you in your work," explains Azzaro. Like his sculpture, the real product of the hub is something intangible, surprising, invisible and, ultimately, a message worth remembering -- one of collaboration, investigation and curiosity that will break traditional design barriers.

For Azzaro, 3D printing has helped him articulate his designs like nothing else before. His very thoughts, his invisible ideas, can be turned into reality.

"I have been digitally sculpting voices for seven years now, and at the beginning the tools I had access to were limited. I began by working on a digital lathe: the work took ages and the noise was unbearable while the results were a long way from what I had imagined. I then turned to laser cutting to obtain the shapes I wanted. Again I wasn't entirely satisfied by the results, even though I pushed the machine to its very limits. I really did have a very clear idea of what I wanted to produce. When 3D printing appeared, I was able to quickly obtain what I wanted. 

"It presents artists with another way of thinking in their creative process. The alliance of software and hardware means it is now possible to push back the creative limits and invent new shapes for new inspiration and new artistic movements."

For others, he's hoping, that articulation of an invisible idea will be something world-altering. 

"Imagine this is the first major step towards the teleportation of objects -- today you can send a file thousands of miles down the line and have the object printed out in next to no time. This is The Next Industrial Revolution."

"I also think a lot of people will soon have their 3D printer at home. You can't escape new technologies, even if we don't always understand or tend to misjudge them. As usual, it will take some time but present generations will soon find 3D printing as important as their cell phones. That's the stage I'm at anyway."

Latest on wired.co.uk