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Jace Clayton Translates Stocks Into Sound

Stock prices fluctuated wildly this week after a sharp plunge on Monday — but what does that <em>sound</em> like?
Andrew Burton
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Stock prices fluctuated wildly this week after a sharp plunge on Monday — but what does that sound like?

News about the stock market's ups and downs hardly comes as music to the ears — unless you happen to be experimental musician Jace Clayton.

Clayton, who also performs and records as DJ /rupture, is working on a new composition called Gbadu And The Moirai Index, which uses an algorithm to translate the market's movements into a piece for four voices. Each singer plays a mythological character — the Moirai are the three Greek goddesses of fate, and Gbadu is a dual-gendered West African fate deity.

Linking the stock market to powerful figures of fate makes sense to Clayton. For him, the Moirai work as sonic manifestations of Wall Street's neoclassical architecture, with its imposing Doric columns and colonnades. Gbadu carries deeper historical resonances.

"Lower Manhattan has so many black and African bodies buried, back from the colonial period," Clayton says.

So he picked a god from West Africa that many of them might have known.

Clayton runs the melodies sung by the four voices through an algorithm that interprets the day's market performances as echoes and reverberations. Each character is linked to four or five stocks that reflect the deity's cosmic role.

"So, for example, the Moirai, the Fate who cuts the string of life," Clayton says. "Her portfolio will include Lockheed Martin — weapons manufacturers."

So what happens to the piece on a day like this past Monday, when the market went berserk? When Clayton runs the algorithm, the melody stays the same, but it sounds heavy and compressed by all the fluctuations.

Clayton says he hopes the project helps people connect with two different things that can feel intimidating and enigmatic: the stock market and experimental music. He plans to stage Gbadu And The Moirai Index somewhere around Wall Street next year.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Neda Ulaby reports on arts, entertainment, and cultural trends for NPR's Arts Desk.
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