Generate your own music from financial data. DataSound is a hackathon project I teamed up with my colleagues to build this tool. I designed the concept and set data infrastructure and pipelines.

Can financial data sing? Of course! For example, if your financial data looks like this, with timestamps in the column headings and license id or purchase id along the left side:

Financial data sample

Inspiration

The data above remains me a piano roll – music storage used to operate piano. It's in production since the end of the 19th century and still being manufactured today. MIDI files mimic this idea, too.

Piano Roll

Sound Synthesis

We used product purchases data as an input of our model. Since mainstream music generally consists of seven notes and repeat at the octave, we had to normalize our time series first by binning them into notes.

Resampling and Binning of Time Series

Harmony is another building block of music. We rounded our notes to different scales and arranged to a tonic, predominant and dominant structure.

Notes harmonisation

Tech stack

  • p5.js
  • tone.js
  • node.js + express.js

Web-interface

Released album on Bandcamp

Teammates

  • V.Grigoriev
  • A.Kireev
  • A.Kotenko
  • S.Kurilov