At the launch conference of SEMI SILENT in October 2016, the architect Ștefan Ghenciulescu talked about the sounds of Bucharest. Based on his observations, the sonic variety and fragmentation are due to the architectural mixity of the city, where Communist buildings hide family houses from the 19th century or Modernist jewels, neighbored by “fresher” apparitions of the darker 1990s or the opportunistic 2000s. Industrial sounds, chickens, the resonance of the concrete blocks bordering the avenues, voices of children in small courtyards, metal building doors, slow traffic, fast traffic, loud music coming from bars and cafés benefiting from the désuet charm of reconverted private houses, old trams crossing quiet residential streets, dogs behind fences, shouting inside badly insulated apartment buildings or more music, and church bells: small bells, big bells, electronic bells, churches on the street level, churches cramped in between or behind buildings, old churches, new churches, exterior speakers with the long Sunday Orthodox mass, long and loud…

A few years later, at an event for the Week of Sound, Philippe Ohse, a Belgian engineer that specialized in concert sound systems (or maybe Sam Auinger, the Austrian theorist, composer and sound artist), talked about the risks of sonic uniformity in the contemporary metropolis, the merits of the quiet areas (made mandatory by the EU in 2009), and the importance of the dynamics in the city’s soundscape, imagining the city as a concert played by different instruments at various levels, with rich tones and timbres, different rhythms, and many possible melodic lines. The loud monotony of the intense and constant traffic was the enemy and had to be avoided in the construction of a better city.

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A selection of soundscapes from the SEMI SILENT Podcast Platform, an invitation to reflection on the sonic imprint of Bucharest and on the identitary sounds that are fading away in the strands of modern living:

La Obor, Robocop by Mihaela Dedeoglu (23’29’’, September 2016) 

Fiare vechi, luăăăm! by Anamaria Pravicencu (4’58”, 2016)

Stimați călători… Gara de Nord! by Mara Mărăcinescu (22’05’’, August 2016)

Lumânări care se topesc by Sașa-Liviu Stoianovici (10’58’’, October 2016)

Bucharest Sketches by Toni Dimitrov (34’08”, April 2020)