HACKER Q&A
📣 rishikeshs

How to Visualize Rain?


I'm an aspiring artist who has fond memories of rain and the monsoon season.

As an artist I always wanted to document or represent the feeling of monsoons through a visual medium.

Any great ideas or thoughts to do this?

Last year I tried recording rain sounds through a microphone and played it on a speaker with paint on it. But the frequency was not strong enough to produce any interesting patters.

Any other suggestions would be appreciated!


  👤 smoe Accepted Answer ✓
This blog post has some interesting works, visualizing sound in very different ways.

https://en.99designs.com.co/blog/design-other/sound-visualiz...

Especially this one contains a lot o things of what you seem to by trying to do. https://vimeo.com/111593305

That said, I don't think you will get very interesting patterns from rain without quite some pre-processing, because rain sound is fairly close to just brown noise.

E.g. what I would try top of mind is to filter out only few of very load drops and start working only with them for the visuals, mixing the rest back in audio only as calming background. It's still going to be random, but should be able to make it to look much more interesting.

Also stereo recording will make a big difference for the audiovisual experience.


👤 gus_massa
Have you tried an spectrogram? For example this accept input from the microphone https://auditoryneuroscience.com/acoustics/spectrogram there are many https://www.google.com/search?q=spectrogram+online

👤 leonry