Music Made with Rain

Story:

I am becoming increasingly fascinated with the idea of creating music out of purely organic sources. It started with music made with bees, but this time around I wanted to record something even more vital, namely water … rain … raindrops. Droplets have many interesting physical properties. One of them is their ability to change pitch based on length of drop and what material they hit. The variation in pitch allowed me to collect over 4 octaves of droplet sounds. A single drop can span over three octaves from the time it hits a surface till the time it splatters.

Geek details:

The first minute of this video is purely made with raindrops sounds.  I recorded raindrops in high-resolution audio (192khz) with a Fostex.  I then sorted the raindrops by pitch and imported them a free tool called Paulstretcher. Paulstretcher allowed me to time-stretch each drop sound to 300 years (yes – a 300 year long audio file). I went into year 151 on each droplet and picked out a tiny sustained segment – allowing me to create pads out of the drops. The drops were then imported into Kontakt sample engine for further manipulation. The mid- and late part of the music contains a variety of virtual instruments, primarily by my company www.8dio.com

The video was recorded in Saint Helena, California and the kids were shot with 200 frames pr. second video.

You can purchase the extended version of the track by clicking here:

Ps. Check out my Music Made with Bees by clicking here:

Never bitch bout’ the rain again

♥ Troels Folmann