Hum Doom
"Real-time interactive synthesizer"
Hum Doom is a data-driven synthesizer installation that interlaces Eastern metaphysics with global financial speculation to form a dynamic sonic experience. Drawing on Chinese Feng Shui principles and real-time stock market data, the work generates an evolving soundscape that probes the entanglement between mysticism, market logic, and algorithmic interpretation.
​Selected Work
At its core, the installation features a custom-built audio system that sonifies market fluctuations, translating financial volatility into sound. Using historical data from the 2008 global financial crisis alongside live trading volumes from NVIDIA, Intel, and AMD, the system creates a generative soundscape that ebbs and crashes in tandem with the S&P 500 index. The resulting tonal shifts narrate the cyclical rise and collapse of economic systems, evoking what Chinese philosophy describes as 混沌 (hùndùn)—a chaotic, unstable order where information, belief, and capital converge.
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The installation invites audience participation. Visitors engage the system through slow, circular gestures—reminiscent of Tai Chi—turning a physical dial embedded in the apparatus. These movements disrupt the existing audio field, fracturing the soundscape and generating new, personalized narrative threads. In doing so, each participant contributes to a unique acoustic configuration, transforming passive listening into a performative, embodied experience.
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Hum Doom draws inspiration from two historical touchpoints. The first occurred between 2007 and 2008, when the Shanghai Stock Exchange skyrocketed to record highs before crashing to a fraction of its value on the eve of the Beijing Olympics—a moment that exposed the tension between nationalistic optimism and the precarity of financial speculation. The second took place in 2023, when China’s Securities Regulatory Commission publicly responded to Proposal No. 6178, denouncing the use of metaphysical practices—such as the Five Elements or Heavenly Stems—to forecast market trends. This state-sanctioned rejection of traditional cosmology underscores a broader friction between spiritual epistemologies and modern regulatory frameworks.
As both instrument and interface, Hum Doom reimagines the market as a sonic ritual. It is a speculative machine: part oracle, part algorithmic engine. The project highlights the paradox of financial capitalism—where irrational human desires are formalized into predictive models that, in turn, shape real-world behavior. Through this lens, Hum Doom questions the performative nature of prediction, and the seduction of certainty in systems built on uncertainty.
By reanimating fragments of both economic history and metaphysical thought, Hum Doom asks: What happens when spiritual logic is rechanneled through digital infrastructure? What can we hear when the violence of markets is transduced into vibration and rhythm? And how might we learn to listen differently—when collapse becomes not an abstract number, but a resonant frequency?
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Staging the stock market as both algorithm and ceremony, Hum Doom offers a new form of sonic speculation—an instrument that listens as much as it speaks.
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May 16-18, 2024 Exhibition at Superbooth in Berlin
​​Support by Synthux Academy
Ewan Peng, Yawen Duan, Xinyu Liu, MurphyNile (Goldsmiths, University of London)