What the Recession Sounds Like with Songsmith

We’ve already seen Microsoft Research’s Songsmith tool being used to create some rather hilarious mashups of music – in fact, those sorts of crazy mixed-up tracks have become their own genre on YouTube it seems (Loving the metal Rick Astley, by the way!).

But now, a German composer by the name of Johannes Kreidler has figured out a way to do something completely different with the Songsmith software. He has derived music from stock-price charts belonging to “Lehman Brothers, Bank of America, GM and other major global companies and market indexes, as well as unemployment rates and other indicators,” reports the Seattle Times.

Kreidler first created the melodies for the charts by hand by drawing points on the graphs and then interpreting them as pitches to write the melodies. The creation is a work of art/political statement called “Charts Music”…and it just goes to show you that Songsmith can certainly be used for something beyond just silly mashups.