Sound Investments: Music and Finance at Mid-Century

Abstract

The histories of finance and music are more interconnected than they might at first appear. From ancient ideas on the mathematical harmony of the universe to ultra-contemporary approaches driven by networked data, the flow of sounds and the circulation of capital have long traced one another’s shadow. Indeed, since the publication of Jacques Attali’s Noise in 1977, musicologists and sound scholars have been probing how music as an expression of mathematical knowledge has intersected with a range of intellectual, social, and economic shifts.