Question

Topic: E-Marketing

Setting Spreadsheets To Music For Marketing

Posted by steven.alker on 10/5/2008 at 12:25 PM ET 2008 Points
Dear Colleagues

A recent question posted by fanscape08, also known as Tom, asked for our opinions about interactive marketing media which use sound, or voice.

https://www.marketingprofs.com/ea/qst_question.asp?qstID=25674

In it, I glibly referred to a work of Douglas Adams (of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fame) where a software millionaire had made his money by inventing software to set financial spreadsheets to music and then play them, rendering them less boring.

If you are interested, the reference is Dirk Gentley’s Holistic Detective Agency, the Character is Gordon Way who unfortunately gets killed in the first few chapters – the book is complexly funny.

I’ve been mucking around with a new home-based music studio recently – basically it does on a couple of computers, two keyboards, my grand piano and a few bits of software what about £1M worth of hardware would have done in the 1980’s. Back then a Fairlight or a PPG wavetable synth cost about £65,000 and the 16 track recording kit and mixer desk set me back another £50,000. Luckily we had a suitable soundproof cellar to put it all in or I would have needed a purpose built studio to house it all, including air-con (Old Moogs and EMS Synthi 100’s drifted with temperature!)

So now I can either play at being Vangelis or John Michelle Jarre or I can use the kit for marketing purposes. As those two are a lot, lot better musicians than I am, my thought turned to using sound for marketing and Douglas Adam’s idea of musical spreadsheets.

It isn’t so futuristic at all these days, as most software and hardware instruments can be driven by MIDI channels which carry all the information needed to make a given synthesiser or electronic musical instrument play whatever you want it to. One PC with the right software can just about replace a 150 piece orchestra as long as you don’t mind synthesised tones. As Midi files do not contain conventional musical notation or any sound files (MP3 or .wav or .wma etc.) it is remarkably difficult to gain copyright on them.

A Midi file of an “In copyright” pop song contains nothing other than numbers and letters which instruct your instrument of choice what to play and how to play it, hence whilst Disney controls all the music from “The Lion King” whether it is in manuscript, MP3 format or on a CD or shared illegally on LimeWire, using the services of a boat-load of lawyers, you can get the all the Midi files for free from: https://www.lionking.org/sounds/MIDI/

You just get your PC to play them using the Microsoft Wavetable Synthesiser which comes with Windows.

It is also possible to translate any string of numbers (Sales figures on a spreadsheet, for example) into MIDI characters and then play them.

How do you think that we can exploit this idea as a marketing tool or an attention grabber? Douglas Adams might have written outlandishly silly books, but he died a very rich man. In addition, if a tribute to his talent were needed, many of his bizarre ideas have actually come to fruition or are about to. Chaos theory and the inter-connectedness of everything is almost commonplace these days, so how about singing, chanting, rocking or Tijuana coming from a set of figures?

I can imagine the opener, “Hello Mr Managing Director. I believe that our sales forecasting software could be of benefit to you, meanwhile, here’s what your last 5 years worth of sales figures sound like”

How would you deploy it? I can almost widgetize music from numbers but I haven’t even given any thought how you would get someone’s company accounts, as published to open as music if you wanted to us it in an email.

Please give me your ideas.

Steve Alker
Xspirt

PS Back in the 1990’s I sent out a series of emails from Outlook Express where I chose a self composed and recorded .wav file for the wallpaper instead of an image.

Not many people know this, but it plays back the sound file as soon as you open the email! It was incredibly effective because it was so novel and really got the recipient’s attention. What can we do in the web 2.0 era?
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RESPONSES

  • Posted by Levon on 10/5/2008 at 7:30 PM Member
    I am not sure what you are asking in this post. What are you marketing?
  • Posted by Jay Hamilton-Roth on 10/5/2008 at 9:55 PM Accepted
    It's an interesting idea, but it seems more novelty than utility. I've heard/read about a number of artists who've converted various inputs to sound. For the most part, what resulted was noise.

    As a utility, the problem is that numerical data is already easy to work with, analyze, and manipulate. Turning it into sound doesn't improve its usefulness.

    A good example of numbers -> music is the Marketplace radio show when they review "the numbers", they start off by playing a snippet of music to indicate the bottom line. That's a very effective summary of the numbers, and doesn't require you to analyze the ups/downs.

    I could see such an example being followed by corporations publishing their annual reports online. The tone of the music would tell you how they think they're doing. No need to wade through paragraphs of interviews and analysis. Just the sound of "Happy Days Are Here Again" tells me that the company has turned some corner and has positive gains to report.
  • Posted by Mikee on 10/6/2008 at 12:39 AM Accepted
    Most spreadsheets do not really have a lot of pattern. Pleasent music no matter what style is based on some patterns. I think that most spreadsheets will create some pretty horrible sounding "music"

    I guess I am not seeing very much comerical application. As Jay mentioned it would mostly be novelty.

    Mike
  • Posted by steven.alker on 10/6/2008 at 5:58 AM Author
    Levon: In this case I’m marketing, “Marketing” For example, how can the medium of sound, interactive or not be deployed to a positive effect? In some respects I am also marketing lunacy – some of my silliest ideas have been the most successful.

    My main products are CRM and Sales Forecasting and the former is quite hard to introduce in a way which gets the attention of the target for 15 seconds. That’s all it takes. Sales Forecasting is ten times easier to open up on, because it is pivotal to a company’s success, especially in this tough market, but getting the attention of a decision maker is still the largest challenge.

    Given that I’ve now got the equivalent of an electronic music studio at my disposal, I want to ask members how it can be deployed – I’d ask you to think laterally and look at the bizarre. Personally, I want to use it for some novel campaigns for my own areas of expertise. More importantly, I’d like to see how ideas like Tom’s and the weird genius of Douglas Adams can be better deployed today.

    If I can produce a product out of it – even better.

    I’ve spoken to one of my neighbours who has a recording studio at his manor house and a rock band and he thinks I’m nuts, so it should work. But then he plays polo, whilst I only watch it, so who’s the sane one there!

    Best wishes

    Steve Alker
    Xspirt


  • Posted by steven.alker on 10/6/2008 at 6:34 AM Author
    Jay: Thanks for the link – It’s an interesting non-annoying use of background music. By the way, Senior Editor Paddy Hirsch’s explanation of CDO’s is the clearest I’ve ever seen and there was me thinking that learning all that math’s for quantum physics was a waste of time!

    Novelty rather than utility? I’d like it to be the former which translates through gaining interest into a utility. Look at it this way. The breed of entrepreneur who call themselves “Internet marketers” appear to legitimately make a lot of money (For the few) by selling the idea of selling – usually courses or training, but the crux point is, that there isn’t an eventual product, just an endless chain of revealing secrets to a mesmerised audience. The money or profit is in the method, not the end-product. Surely there are ways which we can legitimately use the novelty of a medium to create traction for a product or service though legitimate mesmeric marketing?

    Turning numbers into music, rather than noise is difficult. It requires rules and assumptions and the numbers need to be rationalised to fit a musical scale. Financials are more likely to resemble the “atonal” schools of Stockhausen and Berg (Or the enigmatic silence of John Cage!) rather than the latest piece from the Pop Factory, but for fun, scientists have been turning arrays of numbers into structured music since scientist’s in the 1970’s started to generate pieces that sounded like Bach or Hyden from their experimental results.

    It’s even been done more recently and done commercially, but received very little publicity. Stock-Market figures to music was explored in:

    https://www.nhpr.org/node/7858

    on NH Public Radio. Listen – its fun!

    Your last paragraph just about sums up one application – the mechanics of generating it can be left to others, so make a brave assumption: It can be done, now how do we use it?

    Steve Alker
    Xspirt

  • Posted by Jay Hamilton-Roth on 10/6/2008 at 9:23 AM Accepted
    The NH Public Radio link was interesting - thanks.

    Another direction could be helping people with visual handicaps "read" the data. As a sighted individual, I'm constantly scanning lots of text for the information I desire. Those who can't see well (whether blind or simply with tired/aging eyes), can't perform the same action that I take for granted, which means that they're limited in speed of processing data (their brains work fine - their input devices are impaired). Therefore, a sonic spreadsheet or sonic scanner would allow them to "scroll" through the data to pick out something that sounds interesting to them.

    As for how to use it, the Accentus interview (from NH PubRadio) gave some ideas: ring tones or sonic alerts (based on a data trigger).

    Also, from your past use of Outlook Express, imagine a company that emails their financial reports to stockholders. The email will open with music to reflect the news inside (optional feature to prevent a lot of annoyed email recipients).
  • Posted by steven.alker on 10/6/2008 at 1:39 PM Author
    Michele: I fully endorse you personal reservations about having background music or noise interrupting your train of thought. Music doesn’t affect me, but a busy sales floor does. I would have been hopeless as a stock trader in the old days of open outcry! I also struggle to get my son to do his homework without the assistance of an MP3 player, an open laptop and the TV; all simultaneously, but he seems to be immune to distraction and gets his work done regardless.

    Perhaps I am not thinking so much of annoying customers but surprising them. As such the method may be relatively short-lived, but what the heck – fax machines as a means of marketing only lasted for about 20 years.

    Jay’s idea of doing the sounds on a trigger to assist in understanding what is going on probably has mileage. After all, Windows is littered with event driven sounds, some of which are useful, some just plain annoying. From the “You can’t do that” clunk when you try to close a programme which has a dialogue open, through to the minutely ping-pong of an email arriving we are used to the principal of event driven audio signals.

    As a matter of interest, if you search MyComputer for .wav (Basic sound files) and include the system folders and the hidden folders, you will see that there are hundreds of cues used for different reasons. If you want to have a bit of fun and get dismissed, try renaming one file with the name of another or your own favourite rock riff on a colleagues computer. I put my hand up to being guilty of doing this by changing all the “Horse” sounds on her favourite equestrian programme with noises from Formula One!

    The challenge here is to get the computer to produce a sound or a type of sound or a short piece of “Music” from such a trigger and perhaps putting the triggers in a spreadsheet or database. We use Microsoft SQL Server quite extensively, and usually triggers make a database perform an action such as searching the data and producing a report through to sending a warning email to tell a sales manager that some sales person has gone AWOL for a few days whilst not on holiday. Playing the sales projection as music is quite easy, and if it is below target, for instance, you might get it in a minor key. If you are ahead of target, you’d get something sounding happy or uplifting.

    Mikee: I take your point about figures being likely to produce noise. The way round this is to quantise the notes you generate by allocating a range of figures to a given note over perhaps 5 octaves. In a 12 note scale it would still be atonal, but so is much contemporary music. If you use the five note pentatonic scale, it sound much more “Tuneful” and rather oriental or like Claude Debussy on an off day.

    In fact musical scales are purely subjective – we use a 12 note scale because it makes pleasant sounding chords easier to produce and for some reason, the ear and brain can easily handle notes which are separated by 12th root of 2. If you use a 48 note scale (That’s -.48th Root of 2 separation between notes) you have Indian Sitar music. I don’t know about you, but I never really got on with Ravi Shankar’s twiddlings, so it’s a matter of taste.

    Back to Jay: I’ve covered some of the ground on triggers above, but the overall principal needs to be looked at before anyone spends a lot of commercial time developing music for financials. I think that the audible warning trigger for reports and spreadsheets for the partially sighted is brilliant. It might be less annoying that Microsoft’s noises and lead to more effective working for them.

    Best wishes


    Steve Alker
    Xspirt
  • Posted by steven.alker on 10/12/2008 at 10:14 AM Author
    Thanks for all your replies, especially the cautionary ones – there appears to be strong tradition on MarketingProfs of not answering the question, when members feel, for whatever reason, that the questioner has asked the wrong question!

    Firstly some breaking news – a new application has been revealed in the Journal “Music Technology” (Actually. It’s a magazine, but “journal” sounds more impressive)

    It comes from a whacky company called AudioDamage (www.audiodamage.com ) and uses the pioneering work of John Horton Conway a mathematician who devised a set of rules and algorithms which allowed computers to generate musical or rhythmic sounding sequences. Mainly rhythms and effects rather than music synthesis.

    It also uses cellular automata – a software modelling technique which is used in AI, neural networking and research biology. Essentially these models can take a set of numbers for a starting condition and then grow or breed according to a set of rules. The result is not random, but it can be chaotic. The start conditions are set by “drawing” cells on an XY grid. The effects are triggered depending upon the effect selected, the number of cells and coordinates on the grid. At this stage, I havn’t a clue if this can import numbers from a file or whether the GUI is the only way to define things.

    If the bottom line of a spreadsheet were to be used in such a model, the output will be musical, but unpredictable. It would certainly be rhythmic! Certain cells can be used to trigger events – such as making something play stutter or any 4 other common loop effects.. I also contacted the designers of this product in case I have misread the functions.

    Next, some final comments: Juliet You analogy with the mobile phone tones is excellent. This is a true example of a particular string (The digits of a phone number) being used to play a particular sound file or sequence. My take on this would be to use lines in a spreadsheet as the string, key fields for rules and then to generate a musical sequence depending of these conditions. Unlike the phone though, the output would always be different, so there has to be a way of tying down a specific musical output to a particular trigger, if the idea is not to cause confusion.

    The fact that there is no independent correlation between sounds, music and the meaning of life does not mean that the technique can’t be used. I have tested a £20,000 bio-feedback system which was developed by some nutters in Germany. It was presented at a Neurology and Psychology conference in Switzerland. My measuring all 5 of the common brain waves, heart rate, breath rate, eye movement and so on, the system produced a stunning audio and visual display. The subjects were then told to try to train the display by thinking about it or relaxing etc. I don’t think that the resultant sessions indicate much in an absolute sense about the state of the subject but that hardly mattered. Many subjects were able to narrow the sound output to something musical and the visual display to something less or more frenetic.

    I’ll close this in a couple of days, as we seem to be a bit short on the ground for audio expertise!

    Steve Alker
    Xspirt


    :
  • Posted by steven.alker on 10/15/2008 at 8:27 AM Author
    Dear All

    It’s time to close and award some points to some great ideas. I recognise that we are a bit thin on the ground on the audio / sound area, but the lack of expertise reflects a lack of use which probably reflects the fact that as a marketing technique it is:

    a) Crap
    b) Little understood and under-exploited.


    Thankfully, exploring it further does not require me to commit to any conclusions on the above two and if we can come up with easily transportable audio ideas, there may be a boost to specific marketing efforts we can try in these areas.

    I will be investigating the fascinating products from AudioDamage further. What we come up with, I can’t predict, but the software is a low budget item and if it could be used as a useful hook in a marketing campaign, where the distribution of the software would provide real value to someone working on a bigger idea, such as an audio campaign, fostering relationship marketing within the music business or even using it as a creative tool in its own right, we’ll see.

    My idea of “singing” and responsive spreadsheets, on examination, looks to be possible, but rather involved. I’ve come up with (programmed) some tools which work, but they don’t conform to predictable rules to produce recognisable sounds. That means that a tune from a trigger, based on an interpretation of your financials will either be as predictable as Juliet’s programmed tunes for phone numbers or the user won’t know what the hell the audio is all about.

    As a trick to gain interest in something you are trying to propose, it has its merits, but the limit to singing personalised spreadsheets seems at this stage, to be limited to about two “attention getters” after which you move onto something more serious as a discussion. As an ice breaker, it has its merits, but you would need to establish some level of trust otherwise, the recipient simply switches you off without following through your somewhat unconventional means of gaining an introduction.

    As all decent research scientists say at the conclusion of their funded 3 year study, “This obviously merits further research” which translates as “So give me a grant, please”

    If anyone is interested, my blue skies research division always has a bank account awaiting such largess!

    Thanks again and it was a fun explorations.

    Steve Alker
    Xspirt
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