Conventional financial services firms are in the business of rationalizing inequities. Spectral is in the business of making equity sensible.

Finance is conventionally represented using numerical figures, and financial instruments are, in turn, conventionally issued in numerical terms. Spectral deconstructs these conventions.

We specialize in non-representational renderings of finance in color and sound, and we help our clients design, structure and implement financial instruments that are issued in chromatic and sonic terms that are “anexact yet rigorous”.

Our chromatization and sonification services attune financial actors to sensible patterns of events and sensible courses of action that are obscured by rational analyses of numerical figures.

Conventional financial services firms represent and issue finance in numerical terms because numerical terms serve to rationalize inequities and to obscure sensible means of remedying inequities. These firms use numerical financial instruments to exploit inequities: either taking advantage of their clients or helping their clients take advantage of others.

We chromatize and sonify finance so that our clients can sense inequities, and our chromatic and sonic financial instruments are themselves sensible means to remedy inequities. Our chromatic and sonic financial instruments are, above all else, instruments for mutual aid: they do not allow us to take advantage of our clients nor do they allow our clients to take advantage of others.

Spectral offers four services: 

1. Cecil (after Cecil Taylor) is a service that sonifies financial data so as to reveal inequities; 

2. Gilliam (after Sam Gilliam) is a service that chromatizes financial data so as to reveal inequities; 

3. Leeward (after the Leeward Maroons) is a service that helps individuals and co-operatives remedy inequities by designing, structuring, and implementing instruments for co-operative finance that are issued in chromatic and sonic terms; and 

4. Windward (after the Windward Maroons) is a service that helps mutual aid networks remedy inequities by designing, structuring, and implementing “time-based” financial instruments that are issued in chromatic and sonic terms.

Spectral is developing equitable partnerships, not IP.

Our Leeward and Windward services are supported by a distributed ledger technology named Graeber (after David Graeber) and a dissensus protocol named Rancière (after Jacques Rancière). These two tools are developed in-house by Spectral as sensible alternatives to the senseless rationality of the blockchain and its consensus protocols.

However remarkable our tools may be, they are no more than tools. The sensibilities of our service providers are what make or break the services that we offer. Recognizing this, the tools that we develop to support our service providers are made freely available for anyone to use, modify, and share with others.