Show HN: Nasdaq Dubstep
soundcloud.com
soundcloud.com
This really needs to be properly EQ'd though. Watch these tutorials, and you will be able to make the thing sound 10x better with ~30 minutes work. It doesn't matter that the tutorials are for guitar music and are using specific EQ plugins, the advice is universal. Once your spectrum is less saturated, you'll be able to dial back the limiting as well.
There's an entire class of scenarios where conventional HCIs can't represent data for analysis: where people have an occupied visual sense (doctors during surgery), where people are mobile, where people are overloaded by visual data (stock analysts), where the visual sense isn't suited for extracting data from noise (during the Voyager 2 mission), etc. We tend to rely only on our visual sense for communicating data, and as we start using computers for data display in more places, we're reaching the limitations of conventional HCI.
My research was on proving the viability of sonification - looking at the accuracy of comprehension, the cognitive and physiological processes, demonstrating shared mental processes with visual graph comprehension, etc. It's still something I'd love to revisit and commercialize someday.
Years ago, a buddy hosted corporate email, dns, etc. Racks of servers. He added ambient audio to everything he monitored. Nature sounds, weather, birds, insects, etc. The volume, samples, and tempo would change dynamically. Happy soothing sounds when all was well. Disruptive sounds when bad stuff happened.
(I don't know if you'd classify that as sonification.)
Walking around, visiting with guests, talking on the phone, his crew always knew the health of their systems.
It was awesome.
What's interesting is that for visual displays, we have decades of detailed research into visual perception - we know from experience how to design a graph so that patterns can be quickly extracted and understood. We don't yet have that same level of understanding for sonifications, but once we do, applications like this will be even better
There are some traders that use sound alerts when trading short term, either using alerts on the NYSE TICK, or aggregating when certain companies are being hit on the bid or ask.
Also, Data MIDI Lab looks awesome! Now I know what to do with my weekend.
For your next project try using "paul stretch" to create a serene ambient track. It's software that allows you to stretch audio tracks from 101% to 800% and up. Here's Justin Bieber's song "U Smile" 800% slower http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QspuCt1FM9M
You could use all sorts of data to make ambient music. Heck, call it Ambient Data and release numerous tracks. Make dark themed tracks with rain in the background and ambient music created using how many wars have happened in human history and when.
In defense of dubstep, wobble bass is not a defining characteristic of the genre.
It was popularized by later, more club-friendly strands of dubstep (a precursor to the current 'brostep' trend), and is largely absent in the older, most critically acclaimed dubstep productions (e.g. Burial's Untrue or self-titled album)
My comment was intended simply to lament the fact that people a) consider offensive wobble bass the distinguishing feature of dubstep; and b) dismiss the entire genre as 'sounding awful' seemingly on the basis of this association with wobble bass.
A step-by-step overview about how it was done would also be really interesting.