Two new musical pieces based on Microsoft (MSFT) stock price from January 2000 onwards.
MSFT the decline is violins and percussion. The violins have the pitch determined by price, velocity by volume, the rhythm by high/low price difference. The percussion is a kit from Synthetic Kits Reason refill by Nucleus Soundlab. Pitch determine the pattern and various technical indicators such as OBV, MACD and series from the Ichimoku clouds are used for setting the combinator controls. (See chart school on Stockcharts.com if you really want to know)
The reason for using technical indicators is that the movement of the controls should flow from the prices so there could be a musical relationship. The actual audio evidence for this is weak but this is an interesting exercise.
MSFT-MACD uses only the Montreal kit from Synthetic Kits with the pattern selection by the MACD series. OBV controls the combinator buttons.This was just playing with the presets experiment which sounded good.
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 I 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.
Two videos on using AC Toolbox and its algorithmic functions to create a simple song. The songs are recorded in Live with Reason via rewire as the instruments. I really like using the Soul School and Polar Elements refills (see below). What I did not like was that while recording something set off Dr Rex who started playing for a few bars the whole loop. This means the Soundcloud examples are not what was constructed in the video.
Torley has many videos on how to play pieces on the piano and his video on Phillip Glass got me thinking on the structure on the music so with a midi file, Logic and Live I experimented notably with Live follow actions.
