We were tasked with synthesising sounds found during a lightning storm using only electronic methods. Below is a picture of our group’s collective ideas of how to order the storm.

I decided to go down the sound design route focusing more on creating atmospheric and realistic storm sounds rather than creating something tonal or rhythmical. I decided to use my eurorack modular case I’ve been building to experiment around with ways to create storm sounds. I think the modular format really lends itself to sound design because of the way you can interact with it. If you start off with a base idea it can be expanded indefinitely due to modulation and patch order and so on. Below are the sounds I recorded.

To create these wind sounds I patched a digital noise source into a filter with the resonance turned to 3 O’clock. I then patched a random voltage source into the cv input of the filter, controlling the cutoff. The filtering of the white noise modulated by the random voltage led to sounds similar to gusty winds. I also patched an LFO into the frequency cv input of the digital noise source to add another layer of randomness to the windy sound. Below is a photo of the patch I used to create this sound.

For the thunder sound I used the same patch, except this time I attenuated the random voltage decreasing its level. Meaning the modulation on the filter isn’t as intense as it is in the first recording. I turned the filter cutoff to 9 O’clock and the resonance in the same position as the first wind sounds. This created a low rumble sound akin to thunder. Paired together these two sounds work to create the sense of a thunder storm.