Listening to Accounting

There are algorithms for the transformation of accounting data into music, and there is suggestive evidence that it is possible to hear different patterns in it than we see when it is transformed into a graph. We cannot say with certainty whether those different patterns are really there, andwecannot even say that if they were,wewould be able to perceive them audibly without a disciplining education similar to that which has traditionally taught us to seek and find patterns—knowledge—visually. We can say, however, that there is reason to
believe that the mental pathways for the creation of auditory patterns and visual patterns are different. One forms anticipations of events in time; the other forms structures of points in space. One engages the emotions more directly than the other. Each employs different parts of the brain. There are indeed reasons why we might hear something more or at least something else in the music generated by an algorithm than we might see in a picture that was created from the same data.