How to turn stock prices into music
AAPL 1984-2010 is a project which takes the stock price information and converts it into music. The AAPl stock was chosen for its wide price range and because it was one of two stocks the author once owned.
The prices where scaled to a range between 36 and 124 in Open Office spreadsheets. The stock was broken into years because this allowed for a wider range of progressions especially with regard to price. The volume was scaled to between 40 and 120. While midi can be between 0-127 the extreme values are not really audible and not often playable on instruments.
The rhythm is a scale of the difference between daily high and low prices and scales to values between 0.5 and 4. The final values are from an IF macro where values less than .8 become 0.5, values between .9 and 1.7 become 1 and larger than 1.7 is two.
Each time period’s pitch, velocity and rhythm values are exported separately and imported into AC Toolbox (see “A Simple Song” video for AC Tool box info) and used as stockpiles to define a musical piece.
The piece is exported as a midi file to Cognitone’s Synfire to check the harmony and ensure a playable range for the piano. The midi from that process is saved and imported in Reason/Record for instrumentation.
The pieces where conceived roughly as piano pieces so that was the initial instrument with some bass and pads added.
The final works are a bit more monotonous than I initially envisaged but the experiment does lead to further work in this area.
The next steps possibly include adding in more technical analysis figures for controller values. More than one companies stock can be use to construct duets, trios, quartets etc. There is also the use of macro economic data to construct songs.
Via tladb
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