The Sound of a Billion

It’s funny what you’ll do to occupy your time at 4am, with four hours to go before the end of your shift.  
And your senses beginning to drift...

The stories of the day were huge, but settled.  
I’d added my slant and treated them uniquely for the different audiences each hour, around the world.
What to do now?

And it occurred to me that talking about the hundreds of billions of euros being given to the Greek government, or the trillion-plus dollars of a debt ceiling being argued over in the US was plunging most of us into a blizzard of figures and confusion about what “big” really was, any more, in the world of finance.

When I was a boy, ten pennies bought me forty sweets...  
(Fruit Salad chews were two for a half-penny - a farthing each, if that coin had still existed.  Delicious!)
...Fifty pence made you rich beyond fantasy.

For a long time, a millionaire seemed a great thing to be, until the UK property bubble swelled, in the 80s.  

When I specialised as a financial journalist, tens of billions was the common currency.  
But within a year, hundreds of billions and trillions became the norm, as the financial crisis hit.

So - how to illustrate the sound of a billion, and tens of them.  And hundreds?

I hit upon the idea of “creating the sound of a billion”. 

First by recording myself saying “one” ten times...  
Then overlapping ten of those recordings over each other to see what a hundred would ‘sound’ like...   
Then mixing ten of those hundreds to make the sound of a thousand... And so on.

All of which is a long way of saying I spent a happy hour, mixing my robotic delivery into some kind of sonic resemblance of a million.

Yup - a million - not a billion.  

I could see the way the pattern was going.  And I ran out of time.  

And the project was already creating a kind of music.  Maybe.

So - enter the world of the sound engineer and pseudo-artist for a moment and listen to the results.  The sound of a million - built up from ‘ones’.