Sonifying Gasoline Transactions
I continued my experiments towards one of my final project ideas: sonifying transactions. First, I exported all of my financial data (1999-January 2007) from Quicken into a tab-separated file and brought the file into OpenOffice Calc to tidy it up. After I extracted a selection of gasoline purchase from May 2001-May 2002, I realized there was something missing from the data. I'm interested in the rhythm of the purchases against the backdrop of the days and weeks. Since I didn't purchase gasoline daily (thankfully), I needed to write a program that would insert the rest of the days into the transaction data. Doing this by hand seemed like a big pain -- especially once I start working with the full dataset. To avoid having to make the algorithm aware of the number of days in each month, I simply generated a list of dates in OpenOffice Calc and compared it with the dates in my transaction list.
[ download code ]
After filling out my data, I started working in Processing and cSound to sonify the data. Starting simply, I used oscillators of different frequencies to represent days, weeks, and the transactions. The following Processing sketch is based on a sketch I wrote for my Google vs. Microsoft experiments. The classes were overkill for this application, but they were helpful for keeping the Google vs. Microsoft program legible.
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[ listen ]