[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, everyone. Jad here. For this week's podcast, I wanted to play you a piece from one of my favorite producers. His name is Ben Rubin, and he's hard to describe. He's sort of an audio artist, sort of a documentary producer, sort of a visual artist. If anyone out there has been to the New York Times building, the new one, he and his partner Mark Hansen did this sculpture, that crazy moving sculpture that is in the lobby. In any case, this is one of my favorite pieces from him. It's called Open Outcry.

JAD: And I don't want to tell you too much about it, except that it's about commodities trading. You know, like, when you picture the trading floor with hundreds of people screaming out the prices of commodities, there's a name for that. It's called The Open Outcry Trading System, and all those screaming people sort of in that roiling pit determine on this sort of emergent level the price of oil or the price of an ounce of gold, so Ben decided to do a piece about this. And most of what you're gonna hear in this is actual documentary sound he recorded on the trading floor of the New York Mercantile Exchange. There's also gonna be a female voice, an ethereal female voice that was recorded in the studio obviously, which is actually her singing the real price of commodities, the raw data taken from one day, I think in September of 2002, though I'm not sure about that date. In any case, here it is, Open Outcry from Ben Rubin on Radiolab.

WOMAN: Sometimes I say to people, "Didn't you hear me bidding?" And I know if they say, "I didn't hear you," I know they're not telling me the truth because people always hear my voice. It's unique and it's a strong voice, too. If I'm selling October, you know, you don't say—you say, "Oc." And you don't say the full handle, you say, like, "Oc at 10." So I just yell out, "Oc at 10!"

[ARCHIVE CLIP, trader: Oc $70 bid.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, trader: Play by, play by!]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, trader: Sell $25. Oc $75 instead of $78.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, trader: Oc at nine! Oc at nine!]

BEN RUBIN: You're not listening to one person at a time, you're hearing everybody speak at the same time. It's like going to a symphony and hearing every piece of the orchestra but yet hearing the music at the same time.

MAN: And in the midst of that you may observe, for instance, a broker that you've traded with for years. You know what his face looks like when he's laughing, you know what his face looks like when he's upset about something at home. And suddenly he's got a nervous look.

BEN RUBIN: You can tell when somebody's bluffing, when somebody's not bluffing. And this is—these are all skills that are, you know, learned over time. It's really an eternal gut feeling, and as far as just seeing the expression on somebody's face, the way that somebody's breathing, the way that somebody's leaning on someone else. I always knew when a guy behind me had a real order because when he had a big, big order, he used to take my shoulder and shove it to the ground trying to hold himself up.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: traders shouting]

[brokers shouting]

MAN: I've been in the ring 32 years, how do I sound? You know, the open outcry system, which some people may look as an antiquated system, is probably the most sophisticated timely system that's in existence today.

MAN: If you believe in the marketplace, this is as pure a form as it gets.

MAN: If everybody's buying, it's gonna be tougher to buy, right? It's as simple as that.

MAN: Just because you want to sell it at $29.55 and you're offering $29.55, the guy next to you could be selling it, the guy in front of you could be selling it, the guy behind you could be selling it and you might not have sold anything.

MAN: Volatility makes money, war creates turmoil, turmoil creates opportunity. I'm not suggesting that people want terrible outcomes, but I am suggesting that a lot of people depend on it.

[brokers shouting]

MAN: The tempers flare. There's a lot of money flying around moment to moment. There's a classic story. Actually, it's about my father. There was a time in silver when he got into an argument with somebody, and he had their neck down against the rail. And a guy looked at him and he says, "Marty, even though you're chairman of the floor, I'm gonna have to fine you $500 for this." So he looks at the guy, he keeps one hand on the guy's neck, takes the other hand in his pocket, throws down a thousand bucks, and says, "Double it, because I'm gonna finish him off." Two minutes later, they're out having a cup of coffee together.

[brokers shouting]

MAN: There were members in good standing that had been on the trading floor the day before September 11 that we would never see again. And I think people were very, very aware of their absence. In fact, the first trading day, for at least the first trading day, some of their positions in the pit were sort of silhouetted by the outline of their footprints, and people wouldn't step into those spots.

[brokers shouting]

JAD: That's Open Outcry by Ben Rubin. As you can probably tell, that piece was written right after 9/11. He was asked to commemorate the reopening of part of the world financial center. Most of it was still in ruins, but this one part, the Winter Garden, was opening back up, and so he was asked to make a sound piece to install in the Winter Garden. And this is a huge space with a grid of palm trees in the middle, a very, very high domed ceiling, and what he did was he installed speakers underneath the trees, and that's where the voices of the traders came from. But way up top on the ceiling, he had speakers which played the voice of that female ticker.

JAD: So it's as if the traders are on the floor and high up above them, almost ethereally, is the price of their commodities. A kind of a neat idea, except he said in the space the sound was totally terrible. No one could hear anything. So he was happy, as are we, to have it be a radio piece. In any case, you can learn more about Ben at his website, earstudio.com, that's www.earstudio.com. You can also check out our website, Radiolab.org. We are supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Corporation For Public Broadcasting and the National Science Foundation. I'm Jad Abumrad, thank you for listening.

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