Listener

This post is a reprint of a post by Jad Abumrad & Robert Krulwich that originally appeared at WNYC's Radiolab.

On this week’s podcast, Jad presents a piece by one of his favorite producers: Ben Rubin.

Rubin created this audio portrait called “Open Outcry” as a part of a sound installation called Sonic Garden commissioned to celebrate the reopening of the Winter Garden, an atrium space within the World Financial Center, after 9/11.

The trading floor of the New York Mercantile Exchange may look and sound chaotic to the uninitiated, with circles of hundreds of traders shouting unintelligible phonic abbreviations and numbers back and forth. But it’s a complex and sophisticated human system in flux and since 1872, the mosh pit full of traders has driven the prices of energy, metals, livestock and other commodities through this open outcry trading. The trading floor of the NYMEX was destroyed in the attacks of September 11, 2001 when the building that houses it, the World Financial Center, was seriously damaged.

Want to learn more about this piece? Ben did an interesting interview for the Third Coast International Audio Festival and you can learn more about this piece and his approach here.

This post is a reprint of a post by Jad Abumrad & Robert Krulwich that originally appeared at WNYC's Radiolab.

Ever wonder how Jad and Robert met? Well it all began with an everyday encounter where they discovered they both went to the same small liberal arts college in Ohio. For this week’s podcast, the guys go on stage at Oberlin College to tell the tale of their meeting and how they started tinkering around with tape to come up with the Radiolab you know today.

Vintage Radiolab alert! You’ll hear the very first piece Jad and Robert made together. It’s an audio-experiment called “Flag Day” that they submitted to This American Life. TAL’s Ira Glass and Julie Snyder phone in to share what they thought of it.