Stoctaves is a sound installation that generates music in real time from the stock market fluctuations. It remediates the traditional means of viewing and analysing stock data by turning speculations of money into music.
Team: Khushboo Sinha, Suvani Suri
Variable data like stock can
generate a soundscape of textures and tones - every second, different from the
last and never repeating the same stage twice. There is no clear logic as to
how the stock market functions. In all this chaos somewhere exists a pattern
still not accounted for. The temporal factor and unpredictability also creates
curiosity over the development of sound.
As such the thought of an auditory display that
requires a constant awareness of some information, manifested in the form of a
radio station which tunes into the stock market exchange from all around the
world.
The project has its basis in Data Sonification that is the use of sound to communicate information or perceptualise data, as an alternative to visualisation techniques. This project has won many awards. This came in the list of Adobe Design Achievement Awards Semifinalist - 2012. Also the paper "Stoctaves" was selected for publication at the WSCG 2012 conference held at Plzen, Czech Republic. This project was also presented at the India HCI 2012 held at Pune.
Select a company of your interest and hear how it sounds over a period
of time. The sound loops were made relevant to the companies and sector.
Layered over a 3 tier structure, an attempt has been made to portray the stock
price data by rising pitch as the stock price rose, and lowering pitch as it fell.
To allow the user to determine that more than one stock was being portrayed,
different timbres or brightness might be used for the different stocks, or they
may be played to the user from different points in space, for example, through
different sides of their headphones
Stock market has a tense, strict business feel
to it, far flung from the notes of music and making the twain meet by exploring
the ‘unheard’ connections between music and money seems like an interesting
experiment, for the ironic twist it creates.
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