It’s that time of year again. Christmas is coming, snow is falling outside my window, and the wind is whistling.  Maybe it’s late, or my mind is playing tricks on me, but the wind seems a bit more coherent than usual… Musical, even. Creepy.

This is how I’d like to imagine the first Christmas–even the wind crying out. And doing so subtly, not unlike the whispering symbolic language of babies and cattle stalls.

The idea came about from the desire to manipulate various parts of the built environment to create music as the wind is blowing. Maybe change the orientation of a sheet of metal, the size of some opening, etc. With a feedback loop, the system could progress through a melody once it detected that the desired notes of the sequence had been played. Although a composer could control the content, the weather would determine the tempo. A listener may have to wait weeks or months for the piece to complete without sufficient wind.

In the meantime, I created the above synthetic version of what I imagine it could sound like (though the song above would probably have to be recorded somewhere in Antarctica). The synthesized version uses a custom patch written in Pure Data to shape the frequency of white noise to follow a midi file of choice.