Stoctaves

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.