Listen the stock markets...
SpreadPlayer is a digital instrument made from a touch-table with a radar interface. Users can listen to data from stock prices in real time by dragging the logos of listed companies from the Spanish market into the radar area. This project by Derivart emerged from the goal of generating financial visualizations from an artistic standpoint, making use of new technologies and creating a tool that can help integrate visually impaired people in stock markets.
WHAT IS THE SPREADPLAYER?
SpreadPlayer is one of the first projects to emerge from the brainstorming sessions of Derivart in 2004.
The initial idea came from the observation that financial visualizations have barely changed, especially in relation to artistic representations. This happens because in the financial sector –as much as in the military one—experimentation can lead to large losses, either monetary or in terms of human lives. By contrast, art and cultural activity is nowadays often presented as a game, a laboratory in which to experiment without fear, a unique terrain for debate, reflection upon unsettled issues and tying visions from different fields. In imagining what a financial visualization could be like from the standpoint of contemporary art –demonstrating thousands of possible forms of visualizing—Derivart abandons visual representation as its central focus, and represents information from a sound universe.
SpreadPlayer reviews the concept of financial visualization through sound. The installation proposes the notion of "audible representation" and applies it to the context of finance, pinging on the usual Wall Street practice of making a multi-task use of the senses in the trading floor. It is well known, for example, that brokers use their sight to follow the market they are trading, and keep themselves connected to the rest of the market by overhearing conversations. By privileging sound in the individual market experience, SpreadPlayer redefines the traditional concept of financial visualization.
It is also interesting to remark on the development of the SpreadPlayer, both from a technical and conceptual perspective.
Conceptually, the representation of information through sound can be very useful to enable the visually impaired in integrating themselves in work spaces that would otherwise seem inaccessible. This approach has already been demonstrated in medicine and biology: hence the case of Thimothy Cordes, the American biologist who uses software to translate the information encoded in protein structure into sound. Another noteworthy case is the use of music to find cancerous cells in the body.
It is equally interesting to note the possibilities offered by recreation, long used in games and play, and its use in financial visualization as a form of user exploration and interaction.
Technically, the SpreadPlayer is a digital instrument. A peculiar instrument with a user interface that allows the user to generate sounds by touching it. These sounds result from a combination of the musical skill of the user and the financial data received at that moment. In principle, the instrument is designed to use real time stock market data, but Derivart also intends to enable the option to use historical data. This will make it possible to generate compositions with closed stock markets and without a flow of market prices.
The instrument includes different layers of development: user interface, sound engine and distribution system. The instrument modulates the data generated by the Spanish stock market, specifically by the firms that belong to the Ibex 35 market index.
The user interface has been developed in Java, using the Processing framework for artists. The interface allows the user to generate the sound of the interaction of several stocks on the radar. The users interact with a multitouch table by pressing one or several fingers on the screen surface, allowing actions with one or several stocks simultaneously. This type of interface allows for a greater density of stocks to be created, and it lets the user contrapose different stocks to generate comparisons across stocks. The sound is generated by a script of chuck sound.
