You can read my university dissertation here and the abstract below. The writeup was composed in LaTeX.
The full source (including the musical output) is available for posterity on my GitHub account
Abstract
In Douglas Adams’ novel ‘Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency’, he describes software capable of generating music from corporate accounts. The music generated was capable of conveying the state of an account, to the point where a listener was able to make an investment decision.
Over the course of this dissertation, we will design, develop, implement and evaluate two approaches towards achieving this. We will focus on both conveying the account’s nature, and on making the audio output as musical as possible. The first approach explored uses an mathematical approach in which we generate ‘signals’ from the accounts. These signals appropriate to musical sequences. The second approach uses L-Systems to generate music from these same signals.
We will discover in the evaluation that both approaches produce audio output which is considered musical. We will also discover that the L-System approach show’s the highest level of success when conveying the nature of an account.
Finally, we will go forward to design a novel idea called The Financial Genome, in which we attempt to use a biologically inspired approach to identify patterns in accounts, find an optimum genome.