Novi_sad

Sirens

Conceived and directed by Novi_sad

• Sound analysis on recordings, transformation of the results and application of data from stock market crashes by Novi_sad

• Produced by Novi_sad, November 2007 – February 2009

• Original audio and compositions from:

» Richard Chartier | U.S [www.3particles.com]

» CM von Hausswolff | Sweden [www.cmvonhausswolff.net]

» Jacob Kirkegaard | Denmark [www.fonik.dk]

» Helge Sten | Norway [Deathprod, Supersilent]

» Beckie Foon | Canada [A silver mt Zion, Set fire to flames]

The tracks have been manipulated and produced by using the following info / data:

• Track 1 : Richard Chartier | Analysis on vibration recordings from Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges NY / NIKKEI, October 1987 crash, Black Monday

• Track 2 : CM von Hausswolff | Analysis on hydrophone recordings from Mamori Lake, Amazon, Brazil / Deadly Friday, September 1869, Fisk-Gould Scandal

• Track 3 : Jacob Kirkegaard | Analysis on recordings from earthquakes vibrations on earth / Dow Jones crash 1929, Black Tuesday

• Track 4 : Helge Sten | Analysis on sounds from Titan’s atmosphere using the Huygens microphone / dotcom bubble, March 2000

• Track 5 : Beckie Foon | Analysis on recordings from electronic stethoscopes / DAX, October 1987 crash, Black Monday

- Sounds from Titan’s atmosphere using the Huygens microphone are courtesy of The Planetary Society.

- Vibrations on Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges recorded by Scott Konzelmann.

- Tracks 1, 3, 5 produced in Alpha Studio at the Center for Composers, Gotland, Sweden.

- Tracks 2, 4 produced at home studio, Ancient Olympia, Greece.

- CM von Hausswolff’s track produced by manipulating audio material which has been previously used for Hashima film, Japan, 2002 by CM von Hausswolff and Tomas Nordanstad.

- Helge Sten’s original audio track will also be used as a multichannel installation piece in Stavanger, 2009 curated by Anne Hilde Neset.

- Ian Ilavsky recorded Beckie’s cello in Montréal, September 2008.

» In Greek mythology, the Sirens were three dangerous women with the head of a female and the body of a bird, who lived on an island called Sirenum scopuli. All locations were surrounded by cliffs and rocks. Seamen who sailed near were decoyed by the Sirens enchanting music and voices to shipwreck on the rocky coast. With the irresistible charm of their song they lured mariners, although they were not sea deities. They were mantic creatures knowing both the past and the future. Their song took effect at midday, in a windless calm. The end of that song is death. It has been suggested that, with their feathers stolen, their divine nature kept them alive, but unable to provide for their visitors, who starved to death by refusing to leave.

‘Sirens’ is an audio project which explores the aesthetics of information on sound. Initially based on multiple ways of analysis in various types of recordings, this project has been developed and produced by applying numerical and quantitative data from major stockmarket crashes in history on tracks commissioned by other sound artists and musicians.

Through ‘Sirens’, I tried to make audible the flow of data by drawing the boundaries and possibilities in working with numerical elements, since the potential is relentless. These sequences of numbers revealed a huge variety of structures and the decision on what and how I should use was extremely tough. My ultimate goal is to perceive the multi–substance of data that conquers the world of stock markets by applying it on sound. Data and information provide an indelible element which sits comfortably alongside words and it enables us to apply them on certain types of music which circulate among texts on-line and off.

At first, 5 musicians and sound artists were asked to create a piece of approximately 10 minutes length. After that, I started working with analysis on other recorded sounds. I did Convolution, FFT, Spectragram and Sonogram analysis on rare recordings in order to dig out some data from them and transform it to the given tracks. This was an effort to ‘adjust’ them in an equivalent sonic level, always considering the analysis results from the other recordings. I don’t see this as Sonification, but as an effort to work on sound by being guided from elements which pre-exist on these recordings. The whole procedure, enforces the idea of an artificial but yet realistic transformation. The decision of ‘what’ and ‘how’ I should use was hard, since the combinations are too many. I chose this kind of transformation which sounded better to my ears and helped me to work further to evolve and develop the ‘re-synthesis’ of the musical tracks. Few audio elements have been used and transmitted from each recording to each piece.

At the second stage, I focused on the quantitative and numerical data from major stock market crashes in history and their application to the commissioned tracks. Hereby, I would like to note some things about stock market crashes, since I conceive ‘Sirens’ as the ‘soundtrack’ of this collapsing and downturn in both social and financial terms. The use of data from stock markets could be considered as just indicative, but I think that it is very much representative of this enormous amount of information around us. Economies are fundamentally unsound. This is a circumstance of first-rate importance. But stock market crashes are not sound. On the contrary they are exceedingly fragile.

Stock market crashes are social phenomena where external economic events combine with crowd behaviour and psychology in a positive feedback loop that drives investors to sell. Generally speaking, crashes usually occur under the following conditions: a prolonged period of rising stock prices and economic optimism, a market where P/E ratios exceed long-term averages, and extensive use of margin debt and leverage by market participants.

Crashes are substantial and lingering. To be considered a crash, the market decline must be evidenced as a 20% drop in an index’s total value. The stock markets have the kind of cybernetic properties of biological systems and other complex phenomena which can be studied in the same way as biological systems. This tends to give rise to a sense that the market is somehow a natural expression of some fundamental forces.

There is no numerically-specific definition of a crash but the term commonly applies to steep double-digit percentage losses in a stock market index over a period of several days. Crashes are often distinguished from bear markets by panic selling and abrupt, dramatic price declines. Bear markets are periods of declining stock market prices that are measured in months or years. While crashes are often associated with bear markets, they do not necessarily go hand in hand.

The crash functions as a constantly evolving archive of the many meanings, thoughts and translations that it gathers along the way. Sometimes there are explosions of money and sometimes there are famines. The movement of the stocks is based on calculated correlations between the histories of each stock and those of its near neighbours.

Infrequently, the market tends to react irrationally to economic news, even if that news has no real effect on the technical value of securities itself. Therefore, the stock market can be swayed tremendously in either direction by press releases, rumors and mass panic. Furthermore, the stock market comprises a large amount of speculative analysts, or pencil pushers, who have no substantial money or financial interest in the market. Over the short-term, stocks and other securities can be battered or buoyed by any number of fast market-changing events, making the stock market difficult to predict.

On the whole, the great stock market crash can be much more readily explained than the depression that followed it. And among the problems involved in assessing the causes of depression none is more intractable than the responsibility to be assigned to the stock market crash.

The market is a natural expression of the particular artificial world model that it embodies. Feeding the commissioned tracks with massive streams of financial information has been a great challenge for me. Obviously, the amount of numbers I faced up was huge. But, I chose to use the most rapid and long dicreases of indexes and percentages as well as the most detailed statistics and other elements related to time. I stimulated the stock market’s operating time with the length of it’s track. Timewise, the final audio piece has a stimulated connection with the running time of each crash, whether it took place during a single day or when it lasted longer.

The core idea in this project was to produce a reverse movement between the stock market’s collapsing statistics/indexes/numbers and the development in each audio track. From the beginning, my aim was to make each piece denser as long as the numbers, percentages and values collapsing. It was a vise versa action between the market’s crash and audio’s processing and development. In ‘Sirens’, I used data from various types of indexes and values such as industrial/utility/composite/transportation averages, the gold market etc., as well as percentages and quantitative elements.

In that part, I used again some information from the initial analysis on recordings to check out ‘where’ in these sounds [earthquake vibrations, sounds from electronic stethoscopes, sounds from Titan’s atmosphere...] the most intense action was taking place and what sort of ‘action’ that was. For instance –and in simple words- if the Sonogram analysis showed me that there is a very ‘vigorous’ action in the left part of the waveform from earthquake vibration recordings, I worked on the track by considering this and I transfomed it on the audio track’s left part of the waveform, working in detail with the precise ‘position’ of each sound, its ‘movements’, the frequency range etc. The sounds I used were not a single manipulation. Various values have been manipulated to the final result. I didn’t use any external input and I didn’t add any sound other than the original audio. The final tracks have been manipulated and every sound that occurs ‘pre-existed’ in the original composition and it has been ‘unfolded’ and performed by using the previously described methods.

By presenting and producing pieces which -for me- have these awesome nuances of ‘Erebus’, something that is constantly evolving and existing through all the financial affairs, I tried to represent this terrific chaos and infiniteness of data and information. ‘Sirens’ is the auditory reflection of this ‘Erebus’. Human beings are very much exposed against this huge mass of information and this is a fact that has already changed the way we are living, perceiving this world and the way people communicating.

‘Sirens’ is an effort to ‘poison’ the ground and this vast pool of information in a world where almost everything equals with a digit. It could be perceived as the juxtaposition between an aural sentimental longing and the ‘dry’ world of data. The stock markets stumbling across the globe determines a potentially hectic situation which could be ‘finetuned’ by epic, elegiac and heavy sounds. We are living in the era of irrational economies of blood or what Alan Greenspan once called ‘irrational exuberance’.

Economic downturns might mean progress, indeed. I conceive ‘Sirens’ as the soundprint of these downturns.

As an epilogue, I would like to mention a John Kenneth Galbraith’s statement about the Wall Street Crash, 1929:

“Wall Street, in these matters, is like a lovely and accomplished woman who must wear black cotton stockings, heavy woollen underwear, and parade her knowledge as a cook because, unhappily, her supreme accomplishment is as a harlot.”