The Sounds of Rain
by Josephine Livingstone
Illustration by Hallie Bateman
When I woke up in the middle of the night that joined Monday to Tuesday, I only had a few hours left to sleep, but didn’t. The rain was back! My body was tired but the night was singing. I smiled into the dark and listened. That night I stayed awake through the real rain; other times, I depend on simulated rain. I incessantly play RainyCafé while I’m working but also need the Rain, Rain app to fall asleep. My favorite setting is “City Rain” (“Harbor Seagulls” is totally awful, “Rain on a Tent” is fine). I can hardly sleep without it.
Actual rain falling on my urban windows was, however, just too good to miss. I have lived on three continents and my family comes from a fourth: these circumstances have forged in me a deep and abiding attachment to environmental constants. At two, the rain in Hong Kong seemed to bounce off the pavement as high as I was tall. At ten, I slept under a slanted window in an attic bedroom, watched over by rough grey London skies. The smell and the sound of rain, you’ll find, doesn’t change much. Hot rain falling on the sea is a bit different from cold rain falling on concrete, sure, but there’s a note somewhere in there that is always just the same.
Without that constant note, I can’t concentrate or empty my mind. Similar feelings can be found in music, and it is no coincidence that good work-music often sounds a bit rainy. Tim Hecker veers pretty far into the crunchy drone of noise but also likes to punctuate his work with events; snapping, crackling passages that roll across the ceiling of the music like thunder. Slowdive totally sounds like rain. My friend Georgia associates rain with Gnossiennes No. 5. Stan Getz’s Blood Count does it for me. For a whole year I only listened to Wagner’s Parsifal while working, not because I like it that much (I’m not that high-brow) but because my German is so bad that the libretto neither distracted me nor warned me when the terrible screams were coming. Like thunder, screams keep you alert.
Rain sound is like opera because they both have core thematic structures but are also so big and organic that no single moment is characteristic of the whole thing. It takes hours to absorb and appreciate the whole. It is also like opera in that it is music, not noise. A lot of people find brown noise (named for Brownian motion, not the color) or pink noise (named the color of visible light with the same frequency spectrum) soporific, or calming. There are many thousands of hours of these noises to be found on YouTube. But it doesn’t suit me: noise doesn’t vary, it is just a smoothed-out, blanketed audio ooze. Noise has a quality, but not a music. Rain’s musical aspects — the pattering rhythm of its fall, the various percussive timbres specific to its fall on particular surfaces, the sweet modulations of the storm’s thunder-cracks — are particular to it, and special. Noise without dynamics is just silence with a different color.
In honor of the subtle music of rain, therefore, here is a rundown of the five most important types, to me:
Spring rain (London, England)
Spring rain in England happens often. It is a sweet bright sprinkling in the inkling of warm weather, still very cold but landing on blossom rather than bare branches. Attempt to eat in a park and grey clouds will roll over your April lunch break, determined to spatter your sandwich. Watch it through your office window instead, dreaming about your summer holidays and forgetting that this, the green and tender knife-edge of the year, is already perfect. Sleeping under this rain is a bit over-exciting and you may well become tired and stressed. If you have big exams coming up, try to read a detective novel until you get drowsy, then let the imagined pressure of the drizzle bash you gently to sleep.
Summer rain (Hong Kong, China)
It doesn’t rain all that often in Hong Kong, but when it does, it rains very hard. These are my earliest memories of anything. This rain is pummeling, hot, and lands on water and wood and the roofs of the trams. This rain was happening the first time I tried to stay awake all night on purpose and could not manage it. We were too far from the ground to hear the splashing of puddles — inside the cloud, really — so the sound of the storm was deep and structural. I fought the drops coming down the window against the orange night sky and lost.
Autumn storm rain (Brooklyn, USA)
You will be cornered by this rain, which howls at you like a vengeful harpy. Occupy the bedroom accordingly. Make fortifications. Do not let anybody you do not like into your apartment. Danger is everywhere. If there is a hurricane, make sure you have enough red wine and cigarettes in advance. Get ready for thick darkness. Watch Casablanca with one person you trust. Sleep and dream that the sound of stuff smashing on the roof is all about you.
Winter rain (Cape Town, South Africa)
This is driving rain, happening across a grey car park. It is boring, but only because you are a teenager. You try to stay awake to fume about everything but get lulled against your will. You can’t stay angry forever. The rain smothers and traps and soothes you in exactly the same way your big and crazy extended family does, so get used to it.
Total absence of rain (Namibia)
It turns out that after growing up in huge, filthy cities, the general countryside is sort of intolerable but absolute silence is fine. If I was born and raised among traffic and yelling and rain, my dad was born into the opposite. Pressed between endless semi-desert and a huge dry sky, you couldn’t even imagine rain falling on this little bit of earth. But the stars are bright and you are many miles from the people and duties which stress you out. Turns out you can live without the sound of rain as long as everything the rain neutralizes is gone too. Anyway, it is good to visit the places your parents are from and realize that you could live another way if you had to.
Like Klonopin, the therapeutic effect of rain sound lies in its ability to blur selectively. It takes the edge off the silence so that the outlines of your thought (or the purity of your sleep) can stay clear. After I close the rain sound tab I’m listening to now, the inside of my head will feel like your body does after you step off a trampoline: unnaturally hard and heavy, glowing with a kind of swelling and fluorescent anxiety. Empty noiselessness is as horrible as a big, tacky Californian villa. Held in the middle of any ambient cloud of sound — a language I don’t understand, a clattering restaurant, a rainstorm, an airplane’s thrum and rattle — I can sit and work and stay still. I’m not from anywhere in particular, but if I have a home, that’s it.