Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, 1987:
‘But the silliest feature of all was that if you wanted your company accounts represented as a piece of music, it could do that as well. Well, I thought it was silly. The corporate world went bananas over it.’
. . .
‘You see, any aspect of a piece of music can be expressed as a sequence or pattern of numbers,’ enthused Richard. ‘Numbers can express the pitch of notes, the length of notes, patterns of pitches and lengths.’
. . .
The yearly accounts of most British companies emerged sounding like the Dead March from Saul, but in Japan they went for it like a pack of rats. It produced lots of cheery company anthems that started well, but if you were going to criticise you’d probably say that they tended to get a bit loud and squeaky at the end.
Microsoft Songsmith fed Stock Chart data, on YouTube, 2009: