Nature sounds: Romanian secular forests in Vânători Neamț Park included on Earth FM platform
The sounds of the Vânători Neamț Natural Park, as recorded by sound designer George Vlad, have been included in two playlists dedicated to Romania on the Earth FM platform, a global streaming service for natural soundscapes.
Vlad, whose past work can be found in productions such as “Dune: Part II”, “Planet Earth III”, or “Horizon Forbidden West,” spent hundreds of hours in the park to capture the sounds of the forest. His recordings are the first from Romania that were included on the Earth FM platform.
“Romania’s entry on the Earth FM map is more than just a playlist of sound recordings, because it becomes a form of global presence, accessible simultaneously to millions of users around the world. For example, 43.5% of the Earth FM audience is from the United States, 8.2% from the United Kingdom, 4.4% from Canada. It is exactly the audience that travels for nature and that, until now, has rarely had a digital point of contact with Romanian biodiversity,” said the authors of the project in a press release.
The recordings made by George Vlad in Vânători Neamț Natural Park are organized into two playlists on Earth FM. The first playlist, dedicated to soundscapes, represents a complete immersion in the forest atmosphere and brings together 22 ambient recordings with a total duration of approximately 90 minutes.
The second playlist, dedicated to species, gathers 30 short recordings, each about 20 seconds long, totaling around 10 minutes of identifiable sounds. The 26 species captured include 21 bird species, four mammals, and representatives of amphibians and insects.
Among the species recorded are the European bison (Bison bonasus), the Carpathian deer (Cervus elaphus), the golden eagle (Aquila chrysaetos), the capercaillie, a symbol of mountain forests (Tetrao urogallus), and the black woodpecker, the largest woodpecker species in Europe (Dryocopus martius), as well as the bee-eater, a migratory species, one of the most colorful in Romania’s avifauna (Merops apiaster), or the jay (Garrulus glandarius).
Vânători Neamț Natural Park extends over 30,631 hectares in the north of Neamț County, on the border with Suceava County. The area functioned as a reserve of the rulers of Moldavia as early as the 15th–16th centuries, which contributed to the exceptional conservation of local fauna and flora.
Vânători Neamț Natural Park is also one of the few in Europe that holds, within the same geographical space, all three forms of bison management: captivity, semi-freedom, and freedom. On the 30,000 hectares, over 80 individuals currently live freely.
Earth FM is a completely free, non-profit streaming service that brings together over 1,200 immersive natural soundscapes from around the world. Launched in 2022 and developed by the European charity organization Digital Partnership for Regeneration and Reconnection, the platform functions as a kind of “Spotify for nature sounds,” but 100% of subscription revenues go toward expanding the library and supporting field recordings.
“Earth FM exists to make the world’s most important wild places accessible, and George Vlad’s new recordings demonstrate exactly why,” said Cătălin Zorzini, founder of Earth FM.
At the heart of the platform is Nature Soundmap, an interactive map in which each heart-shaped marker opens a unique recording from a corner of the world. The map covers dozens of countries on all continents, and allows listeners to tune into lions and hippos from the Serengeti, crickets from the banks of the Niobrara River in Nebraska, the sounds of spring at the foothills of the Himalayas, and more.
(Photo source: Dan Dinu/press release)
