Continuing on yesterday’s theme of sound-based interfaces for transmitting financial information, here’s another proposed tool which lets users listen to market activity. The SpreadPlayer, designed by the interdisciplinary art group Derivart, is a portable mp3 player paired with custom software which translates data about market indices into audible changes in the frequency and volume heard throught the player.

SpreadPlayer relies on sound to revise the concept of financial visualization. The installation translates concepts used in finance into auditive ideas such as frequency and volume. It transmits the state of the stock market through sound, liberating the user’s eyes and stimulating alternative senses such as the ear, the musical sense or the sense of rhythm.

The installation includes an MP3 player, a proprietary software package, a real time connection to the capital markets and the packaging of the product. The player displays variations in prices of specific stocks, as well as fluctuation in indices in real time. It offers the option of modifying the sound output with the “melody” tool (which changes the average price of a stock), cancelling the “noise” of a stock (eliminating its financial peaks) or calculating an average of the up and down movements. Visually, it evokes the aesthetics of other players (iPod, Creative Zen, etc.) as well as their software (iTunes, Windows Media Player), emphasizing the idea of a mass market product.

SpreadPlayer offers a new concept, the notion of “auditive representation”. It reintroduces, at an individual and portable level, the usual reliance of brokers of multi-tasking while working from trading rooms. Traders, for example, use their sight to watch the piece of the market in which they are buying or selling, but remain connected to the broader market by overhearing the conversations of their fellow traders. By reintroducing sound in the individual experience of the market, SpreadPlayer redefines the traditional concept of financial visualization.

Derivart’s resident economic sociologist is Daniel Beunza, who just joined the faculty of the Columbia Business School as an Assistant Professor. For more information on Derivart, including some of their other projects, check out this post at We Make Money Not Art: Art, Finance and Technology.