BEHIND THE SCENES with producer Ben Rubin

What was your impetus for creating Open Outcry

A few months after 9/11, I was asked to create a soundscape 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 eight stories high and it's covered by a curving glass ceiling. They have an unusual sound system there with 16 playback channels that feed about 100 speakers. The speakers are distributed all over the space. There are 16 tall palm trees in the center of the space, arranged in a 4x4 grid, and each tree has four 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 Radio Lab , and others are all expanding the notion of what radio can be.