The following text and pictures illustrate an experiment I carried out that involved training laboratory standard rats in trading in the Foreign Exchange and Commodity Futures markets, with the result that I managed to outperform some of the world’ s leading Human Fund managers. The conceptualizing, training, and organization of data was hard work- I broke it down into different steps:
STEP 1 DEVELOPMENT OF TICKER TRACKS
The first part of the experiment was the generation of so called ticker tracks; I used tick data from various futures and foreign exchange markets in order to generate sound in accordance to the real time price data. The relevant literature indicated that rats especially respond to piano sounds, so I used these as a base for the ticker tracks. I used a Software called Sonification Sandbox, provided by the School of Psychology at the Gerorgia Institute of technology. The sonification sandbox sofware is the ideal environment to transform data into sound, which is commonly known in science as Sonification.
The sound was modulated in correlation with the price movement: when the price went up, the pitch went up, always depending on how strong the up-movement had been. When prices dropped, the following sound’s pitch was reduced, depending on how strong the price had fallen. Always in regard to how long it took for the next trade to happen (time between trades can vary between one second and one minute occasionally), I used different kinds of piano modulations. After some tests, we found that our subjects reacted best to 25 price ticks or sounds, so one track was to take 10 to 20 seconds accordingly, depending on the market movements.
The following illustrations show some of the charts and historic real time data used. The viewer might also get an impression of what the sound files looked like.
This way we were able to listen to the Sound of Futures Markets. Keep in mind that the data used are only tick data- the last three digits of the futures quote.
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Every Tuesday is Art Tuesday here at Adafruit! Today we celebrate artists and makers from around the world who are designing innovative and creative works using technology, science, electronics and more. You can start your own career as an artist today with Adafruit’s conductive paints, art-related electronics kits, LEDs, wearables, 3D printers and more! Make your most imaginative designs come to life with our helpful tutorials from the Adafruit Learning System. And don’t forget to check in every Art Tuesday for more artistic inspiration here on the Adafruit Blog!