As a tour guide, I once looked after a blind person. It was fascinating how different for her was the perception of a place that she cannot see but can hear. I decided to check what Iceland sounds like. The beginning of collecting field recordings from the island coincided with the global lockdown caused by the coronavirus pandemic, which is why most of the places visited were empty.

This emptiness was poignant, but it gave nature a space for undisturbed speech.

Everything here has a sound, even northern lights. They, obviously, don’t produce it themselves, but watching them in the middle of a quiet night has a specific sound that – to me – is the sound of northern lights.

So I decided to record all of these things and places, make a sound map of Iceland and let people, who can’t travel or can’t see, experience the island from a different perspective.

I called this project “Niður / noise / szum”, and it is an attempt to find an answer to the question “what does Iceland sound like?” by collecting field recordings from the island and talking to its inhabitants. There is noise in the background of everything I do. The noise of the wind, the noise of waterfalls, the sound of water. Hence the title of the project. In Icelandic we have over 20 words for snow and not much less for noise, so finding the right word for the name of the project took me several hours of talking to native Icelanders. This shows how complicated the relationship with nature is here.

For now, we will hear sounds from the most popular tourist places in Iceland: the Gullfoss waterfall and the Strokkur geyser, the Glacier Lagoon, Grjótagjá – cave known to fans of “Game of Thrones”, where a love scene with Ygrytte and Jon Snow was filmed.

We will also hear one of the most brutal storms in history, the February 2020 low pressure bomb genesis, which kept all of Reykjavik closed under a red weather alert, for the first time in history. Each sound is accompanied by a story and the map is updated almost daily. You can find it at www.noisefromiceland.com.

I am a graduate (MA) of musicology at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków and a graduate of the violin class of the State Secondary School of Art in Zakopane. I compose and produce electronic music using field recordings. As a violinist, I collaborated with artists from Poland and Italy. I am also a music journalist.

More info: noisefromiceland.com

To me, puffins are the cutest (I call them “flying kittens”) and the most talkative creatures I know. They sound like they’re constantly surprised. “Oooh? Uuuh?”. Picture made by Magdalena Łukasiak.

Grjótagjá – the cave with hot water where love scene from “Game of Thrones” was filmed

Me in northern Iceland recording the sound of sheep

Krafla volcano and its geothermal power plant. Even though I was recording about 2 kilometers away, the noise was almost unbearable.

Krafla volcano is very loud and very beautiful

Here I was recording the sound of fumarole, an opening in a planet’s crust which emits steam and gases such as carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, hydrogen chloride, and hydrogen sulfide

I guess it is hard to believe, but even northern lights have their sound

The variety of sounds on glaciers is huge. It is worth recording them, because some of them will disappear from the surface in 100 years.

Diamond Beach and Glacier Lagoon were completely empty when I was recording them. I have never seen them like that, not fed up with tourists. So I could finally hear how rich the sound of them is.

This is something you never see here. Jokulsarlón glacier lagoon. Empty.

When I was recording Reynisfjara, Black Sand Beach close to Vik, it was just me and my mum. Besides, no one in sight. It was downright overwhelming.

We have met few people – photographers – close to Skogafoss waterfall that welcomed us with a beautiful rainbow.

And this is how my sound map of Iceland looks like right now. You can find it on www.noisefromiceland.com. I update it almost every day.

And this is me with Reykjavik on the background :-) Photo taken by Magdalena Łukasiak

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