What does the stock market sound like during a pandemic?

If you have found yourself becoming desensitized to all those charts and graphs on the current state of the stock market, you’re not alone. Sometimes, when information is always presented in the same format, it can lose its emphasis and a bar graph is just another bar graph. But what if you could hear the data instead, would that make it more powerful and leave a more lasting impression? 

That’s what Jordan Wirfs-Brock, an information science Ph.D. student at the University of Boulder Colorado, set out to accomplish. She decided to use sonification — the practice of conveying information through sounds — to create a new way to “graph” the stock market. The result, which you can listen to in a short interview with Wirfs-Brock here, is a 12-second clip of sound that represents the state of the Dow Jones Industrial Average from Jan. 2 to March 27, 2020.

Each second contains five days’ worth of sounds, with the pitch going up or down depending on the volatility and the final closing price for each day. A high pitch represents a high volatility and a high closing price, while a low pitch represents a low volatility and a low closing price. As you can imagine, things sound pretty steady until about the end of February and beginning of March when the COVID-19 pandemic began to ramp up. From there, however, things start to sound really crazy.