Financial Symphony

Financial Symphony is a new piece from Loud Numbers, my data-to-music studio with Miriam Quick. It turns 11 years of business data into a four-minute piece of electroacoustic music for string quartet and electronics, and was commissioned by the accounting software company Sage.

The story it tells is about technology is making business more efficient over time. Across those 11 years, UK invoices get bigger and get paid much, much, muuuuch faster. That's kinda personal for Miriam and I - Loud Numbers is a small business, and how quick we get paid matters to us!

There are two data-driven layers. The string quartet, composed by Miriam, plays the historical UK invoice data. Each bar is one quarter, and the length of a long opening note reflects how long invoices took to get paid, so as payment times fall the music gets quicker and busier. The strings also get louder as average invoice size increases over time.

My bit was the electronic background layer. Using data from South Africa, France and the United States, I made three synth pulses that each sound whenever the average Sage business in that country moves a fixed amount of money - one rand of payroll, one euro cent of payroll, ten dollars paid out to partners. They play in pseudo-real-time, out of sync with the beat. I built a little tool called Datarates to generate the midi for these, which is now out in the world for anyone to use.

I also recorded myself hitting windows, sofas, cabinets, shelves and walls in and around my studio, and sequenced the results into a percussion track that provides rhythm without sounding like "drums" - a bit like Múm on their first few albums, which I love. The early versions were a bit more syncopated, but Miriam suggested making the percussion part more metrical so the pulses had something steady to push against. I also wrote the bassline on my bass guitar, noodling along to Miriam's string part, then simplified it in Ableton.

Afterwards I did a round of radio interviews on community stations around the UK, capped off with an appearance on BBC Radio 5 Live.

You can listen to the full track on Spotify:

Credits: The strings were recorded at Ten87 Studios in Tottenham, with Miriam conducting Simon Hewitt Jones and Coco Azoitei on violins, Judit Kelemen on viola, and Hannah Lewis on cello. Westbound Films made the making-of film.

Thanks to Sage, Axicom, Westbound, and of course my Loud Numbers parter-in-sonification Miriam Quick for making it happen.