A fiend with a multitude of mouths, which beget sounds that range from hissing to groaning, as it becomes every respectable monster – this is today's Bucharest, not only a city with traffic, alarms, and decibels of construction sites, but also a place with "voices." Those mouths are everywhere – restaurants, banks, supermarkets, and the public transportation. You may pass by such a mouth that piercingly "sings" "songs" on just three or four notes, in some kind of a parlando, invariably in English, whose "lyrics" almost invariably include the word "baby," but, more often than not, without any real melodic line or structure. Unfortunately, you may have to walk on and run into another such mouth, no longer "singing" in the middle register, but, rather, abusively attempting higher notes, which amounts to downright screaming. The next mouth may whiten its already shrill sounds unnecessarily, probably to suggest some kind of a child's voice, as the "singers" are torturing both their own throats and the listeners with the help of electronic amplification. The "orchestration" is very imaginative, indeed. Some of it is made up of metal sounds, as if two kitchen spoons were banged against each other and the recorded sound was processed by computer subsequently. But the really hellish sources play low drums – that organized noise probably called rap, namely the phenomenon that rapes ears. Thundering like bombs at extremely precise regular intervals, which is something the human mind was not created to put up with. Yet other Bucharest mouths speak, rather than "sing." For example, some of them will carry incomprehensible promises in Romanian by politicians on blindingly-lit screens; or, in the windows of book shops of all places, you get monitors with "mouths" grunting commercials or loudly warning you that too much salt is bad for your health. Or radio shows incessantly speak through yet other mouths of the city, in a sonorous flood attempting to be funny, but sometimes including material that is unsuitable for minors. And all this unrelenting talk also comes via sub-woofers or other bass-enhancing technologies. According to various websites, low-frequency sounds are reportedly used as a non-lethal weapon in war theaters. Is lethal on the way?
by Monica Voiculescu
