The Gold Line

High-frequency trading uses complex algorithms to scan multiple markets and execute orders in microseconds, demanding the fastest, most direct links between exchanges. In 2012 traders began using microwave radio networks, relayed by antennas on tall, often unnoticed structures, to send data between the New York Stock Exchange’s data centre in Mahwah, New Jersey, and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in Aurora, West Chicago, in about 4.01 milliseconds along a route insiders call the Gold Line.

Sound artists Dinah Bird and Jean-Philipe Renoult, fascinated by these antennas and the paths they forge, have been documenting the physical routes the money makes since 2016.
In 2018 sound made a ‘slow’ high frequency road trip along the Gold Line that took 6 weeks. Following towers in the Allegheny mountains of rural Pennsylvania, past Amish homesteads, through the flat plains of Ohio and past the immaculately mowed lawns of Indiana, they made extensive location recordings, both next to the antennas and by tuning into their frequencies over the airwaves.
This is an invitation to the listener to reimagine the movement of money. What exactly does this sound like? We hear the static pops and dissonant hums of radio signals intercut with the wind blowing in the antenna wires and the whirring of huge ventilation systems as we drive along Interstate 80. The road trip is punctuated by interventions from experts such as sociologist Donald Mackenzie who tells us how HFT works and just who takes part in these 'speed races'. 

With contributions from : Donald Mackenzie, Alex Pilosov, Night Owl and Stéphane Tyc.
All recordings and music : Bird & Renoult
Produced by Dinah Bird and Jean-Philippe Renoult.
Executive producer : Lucia Scazzocchio
A Social Broadcast for BBC Radio 3.