Jul

21

Tone, from Jim Sogi

July 21, 2011 |

Tone is as important to music as pitch. You've heard a new violin player playing the notes on the chart but the tone is awful. Yo Yo Ma plays sweet modulating tones. Focusing on just price without regard to tone leaves out relevant and important information.

The market has tone. Quiet, jumpy, weak, anxious, thin, bullish and dense internals. The environment, political, news, economic, social, international also establishes a mood and tone to the market that cannot be ignored except at your own risk. The prior tone is also relevant as music is not discrete tones and notes, but a integrated statement over time. Emotion is the main vehicle of music and also with the markets.

Tone both creates emotion and is the result of emotion. Voice carries emotion: The cry of a baby, the angry tones of politicians, the whine of the complainer each has distinct tonal qualities. The tone carries meaning and has persuasive force. The question is how to quantify it or even qualify it to learn the meaning in the market.

Emotion also has established patterns: Denial, anger, acceptance; fear, capitulation, numbness; catastrophe,catharsis; infatuation, love, boredom, hate. If tone both reveals and creates emotion, understanding the tone of the market will reveal its emotional state and reveal its emotional stage giving a clue to the next phase.

Jordan Low writes: 

The yogis believe in seven chakras in the human body, each corresponding to one of the seven pitches, each corresponding to a different emotion. The stages of grieving you describe go from lower chakras/pitch to higher.

Soros reacts in his gut, which is one of the lower pitches — probably a survival type of emotion. The tone probably is the intensity of the energy at that chakra — I am thinking market volume. We are probably saying the same thing — I find it interesting but am adding quite little.

BTW, the chakras also correspond to the colors in the rainbow, red with the lowest frequency is below.

Laurence Glazier writes:

For these reasons I find alternating attention between composing and trading congruent, as they are carriers of emotion at different scales.

From my point of view the Elliott Wave framework fits well, being a sequence of eight stages whose final three are labelled A, B, C. As I often use a fractal structure in music, that is another similarity. I may be slow, but it has taken me years to internalise patterns which are lately becoming clearer to see.

Yesterday I put sixty years of the S&P into Advanced GET. The astonishing rise from the doldrums must, in part, be a distortion reflecting the love of printing money, but even were this transcribed from dollars to ounces of gold, I think the ascension of computer followed by internet technology would show how much these developments have added to the wealth of the world.

As I move between Monthly, Weekly and Daily views, the software messes up the precision of my placement of wave counts, and I am thinking to move the whole thing into a graphics program, with the different scales, whether grand or minuettes, callable up via layers. This would help me watch day by day what's going on, a work of art within an art program.

It is impossible to experience in full a piece of music from a short excerpt, and I think likewise the Market, with all its waves and eddies, needs attention from up close and afar.

Also, the rainbow, the universal belief that there are seven colors in it may stem from Isaac Newton's assertion, which was based on his mystic ideas about numerology.

However if you look at a rainbow and count, it is not clear whether blue, indigo and violet are really three colors or two. Also the yellow band is very narrow, though often depicted as equal to the others.

I think context in time is part of what the Market (like a human being) experiences, so as well as volume one might want might look at moving average based indicators, and fractal perspectives.

Laurel Kenner writes: 

Mr. Sogi is exploring an endlessly fascinating topic with his exceptional lucidity and depth of experience. Great performers play the heartstrings by varying tone within phrases. (They also vary dynamics and duration of individual notes in phrases.) They learn how to do this by spending years with master teachers and figuring things out on their own. That's why synthesized music can sound only like an approximation of the "real thing." Because the market is a bazaar of human voices, expressing workaday practicalities, aspirations, fears and strategies, I don't think it's unduly anthropomorphic to look at it as a great performer. And while some of a great performance is spontaneous, much involves muscle memory that training has made reflexive, and must therefore be susceptible of being "sussed out."

Rocky Humbert writes: 

There's an old game/tv game show called "Name that tune". The gist is that competitors would try to identify the title of a song by hearing only the first X notes; the winner would correctly name the tune in the fewest notes. Human memory being what it is, it was possible to name many popular pieces and classical symphonies by hearing only the first measure of a piece.

However, if one picked a RANDOM measure from somewhere in the middle of the same piece, it was vastly more difficult to identify the title correctly with the same consistency.

This is a reflection of how our memories work; and this phenomenon may have relevance for people looking for patterns in the middle of time series — as opposed to the beginning and ends of time series.

Alan Millhone writes: 

Hello Rocky,

My old friend and top Master checker player, Karl D. Albrecht from Michigan was walking around the playing room full of players at the Tennessee tournament. As Karl walked by many games that were being played into the mid-game he could by sight and memory accurately tell you from what checker opening each board position originated. I found this remarkable.

Regards,

Alan 


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