The sound of eBay is an online musical art project that translates your eBay account data into electronic music. By entering your eBay username into the application, the data from buying and selling transactions is generated into a song - a soundtrack to your eBay history.
Apart from being 'art', the reasoning behind the project is unclear. The bizarre explanation on the Teletext-styled website doesn't help either: "First there was silence... Then there was data... But there was no story... Just images and sounds... cities were built and a grid was laid on top of the topography".
"Within this global grid a company named eBay became the largest marketplace, with very local marketspaces. eBay is romantic and seductive, not like the local fleamarkets in Paris (Le marché aux puces de Saint-Ouen) but sexed up a million times bigger and spherically transcended, much more effective and thoroughly commercialized. We love it! "The Sound of eBay" is the affirmative high-end low-tech contribution to the atomic soundtrack of the new peer-to-peer hyper-catastrophic shock-capitalism".
By Tom Porter
