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Behind the Scenes with Ben Rubin, sound artist and producer of Open Outcry
Interview conducted by Julie Shapiro
> What was your impetus for creating Open Outcry?
A few months after 9/11, I was asked to create a sound that would commemorate
the reopening of the Winter Garden, a huge atrium space in the World Financial
Center that was destroyed when the towers came down. The place was still in
shambles then, and the World Financial Center complex was mostly empty, but one
building on the far end of the complex was already filled with people. And
those people were doing something curious. They were standing around in huge
circles, hundreds of them, and shouting at each other, for hours, every day. It
turns out that this shouting has a name; it's called open outcry trading, and
through it these people, almost all of them men, set the price that the world
will pay each day for a barrel of oil, a gallon of gas, an ounce of gold, and a
few other things. Although their building was surrounded by wreckage and
accessible at first only by boat, the traders of the New York Mercantile
Exchange had come back to work only a few weeks after 9/11. When I thought
about what sound represented that place, it was this: the sound of these men
shouting, each doing his best to buy low and sell high, a music of call and
response that had been produced in lower Manhattan by generations of traders
since the 19th century. More recently, it's here that the traders have been
reacting to rumblings of war, and then to actual war, the prices of energy and
precious metals lurching and trembling as events unfolded in Washington, at the
U.N., and in Iraq. This piece was made before the war; it was first played last
fall in the Winter Garden.
> Do you think of Open Outcry in terms of being a documentary, or do you
call it a soundscape? How do you describe it to others?
I think the best way to describe Open Outcry is as an audio portrait. The piece
has three layers, and all are derived from the activities of the commodities
traders in one way or another. The underlying layer is the sound of the traders
on the floor of the New York Mercantile Exchange, a kind of primal human roar.
The next layer includes the voices of individual traders as they haggle with
each other, and as they talked to me about their work. The third layer (and the
first thing you hear in the piece) is an audible rendition of the ebb and flow
of commodities prices. I recorded actual commodities prices from an online feed
for a few hours one day last September, and then I coded the data into a simple
musical system. It's meant to be an audible version of a financial ticker. The
prices are sung by my friend Elisa Zuritsky. I wanted a cool, female voice as a
contrast to the hot, overwhelmingly male voices from the trading floor. I also
wanted to find a way to bring the commodities themselves into the picture
somehow. All these guys are buying and selling oil, gas, gold, orange juice,
coffee, and other oddly familiar things. It's interesting to me that the actual
names of these things are never spoken by the traders in the pits. The very
notion of commodities and the term "commoditization" relate to the way these
everyday things become completely abstracted when they become the subject of
speculative trading. I wanted the music to bring the names of the commodities
back into the soundscape.
> Although Open Outcry sounds beautiful while i'm sitting at my desk
listening to it, I know it was composed originally as a sound installation. Can
you describe how the installation was designed, and the space it was designed
for?
Open Outcry was originally created for the Winter Garden in the World Financial
Center here in New York. It's an indoor space made of polished granite about
the size of a football field; it's about 8 stories high, and it's covered by a
curving glass ceiling. They have an unusual sound system there with sixteen
playback channels that feed about 100 speakers. The speakers are distributed
all over the space. There are sixteen tall palm trees in the center of the
space, arranged in a 4x4 grid, and each tree has 4 speakers (plus a subwoofer)
hidden underneath it under a grate below the floor, facing up. The voices of
the traders buying and selling came up from these tree speakers -- a voice near
one tree would call out "50 bid," and a voice near a tree 20 yards away would
answer, "sold!" It was a great opportunity to give a spatial dimension to the
call-and-response aspect of the piece. The background roar of the traders came
from wall speakers all around, and the music of the singing ticker floated down
from speakers high above the trees.
> You say that as a sound artist you work a lot with layering voices
that "wash over" a listener. What's the experience you're hoping to offer via
this production style?
This is a great question and one I don't have an easy answer for. Layering
voices is a natural impulse for me -- using voices to create a texture, a
murmur, or in this case a mob. I think it's something that's more natural in
relation to a physical installation. I love creating spaces where you feel
surrounded by voices coming from every direction. In 1993 I saw an installation
by John Cage in an abandoned East Berlin church. There were 50 speakers placed
all around on the walls of the church, and each one was playing a different
recording of John Cage reading from Thoreau's On Civil Disobedience. The
feeling of being inside of this murmuring voice space was very powerful and has
stuck with me. Some of Janet Cardif's recent work has the same effect. What's
interesting is to see how that intention translates to radio -- or, more
generally, to a stereo recording that people will play on their walkmans or
stereo systems or in their cars. How does the experience change when the
listener is no longer physically surrounded by the voices? I'm still figuring
that out.
> Why does the piece end with a story about 9/11?
9/11 finally feels far away as I write this in April of 2003, but even last
summer when I recorded this piece, it was never far from anyone's consciousness
in New York. That was especially true for these traders, nearly all of whom had
been at work that day less than one block away from the twin towers. Even
today, they still walk past the gaping absence of ground zero just to get from
the subway to the NYMEX building. I never wanted to make a memorial piece
exactly -- this piece was commissioned for the re-opening of the World
Financial Center after months of reconstruction, so it seemed fitting to engage
the trading activities that are the present and the future of this place.
Still, in one of my interviews, Vincent Viola, the NYMEX chairman, remembered
that for the first trading day after 9/11, the places of missing traders were
silhouetted by the outline of their footprints, and that other traders would
not step in to those spots. I found that image very moving.
> As a sound artist/designer, are you interested in radio as a potential
destination point for your work?
Yes! There are some really exciting outlets now for new kinds of sound work.
This American Life, The Next Big Thing, Joe Frank, WNYC's Radiolab, and others
are all expanding the notion of what radio can be.
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