Countryside Sounds from Romania

The sounds of the Romanian countryside on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

Decades ago I used to spend entire afternoons in the garden with a book. I would immerse myself in made up worlds, while listening to real soundscapes that washed over me. I can clearly remember the calls of orioles, doves, magpies, jays, tits, woodpeckers, bee-eaters, swallows, sparrows and many others. Small annoyances like the occasional fly provided a sense of scale to the ambience. All this – tied together by soft wind in the trees and vegetation. These wild elements were not alone making up the soundscape. Roosters, guard dogs, livestock and other domesticated animals had their places in the sound spectrum.

On Sundays there wasn’t a lot of traffic and people didn’t work too much, but there would be occasional man-made sounds every now and then. The soundscape of the village is lush, and its acoustics are very interesting as it sits on a few hills overlooking valleys with creeks at the bottom. This creates beautiful echoes, but also allows sounds coming from distant places to carry for longer and seem closer than they are. All this results in a pleasant and surprisingly present soundtrack to country life. You’re never too far away from your neighbors. It’s easy to listen in to what they’re doing, for better or worse. Understandably, privacy in your own back yard is quite limited. The up side of all this is the great sense of community that is apparent everywhere. 30 odd years later, things have certainly changed. I was there last week and managed to find a spot where the soundscape was almost exactly the same though. As a bonus, a very accommodating couple of orioles sang for more than an hour from a tree close to where I set up my rig.