Rain sounds
Rain built from three layers of filtered noise: the low body you hear indoors, the broad hiss of water hitting the ground, and the droplet detail on top that makes it read as rain rather than as static.
Why rain is the sound almost everyone picks first
Rain is the most requested background sound by a wide margin, and the reasons are more interesting than habit. It is broadband, so it masks across the whole speech range instead of leaving a gap where a voice can still cut through. It is unpredictable at the small scale but completely predictable at the large one, so there is nothing in it for attention to lock onto. And it carries no information — no words, no melody, nothing your brain can decode and then be occupied by.
There may also be something to the fact that heavy rain outside has meant "nothing is going to happen for a while" for most of human history. That part is a story rather than a finding, and it is offered as one.
The practical version is simpler. Rain sits in a sweet spot between white noise, which many people find harsh, and brown noise, which some find oppressive. If you have tried a noise generator and disliked it, rain is the thing to try next.
How this rain is put together
Three bands, because real rain is three sounds arriving together. The lowest is brown noise through a gentle low-pass at a few hundred hertz — that is the rumble you hear through a window rather than the rain itself. The middle band is pink noise across the broad centre of the spectrum, which is the sheet of water hitting ground and roofs. The top band is white noise above about 2.6 kHz with a small resonant lift near 5 kHz, and that is the layer doing the real work: individual droplets are what the ear uses to identify a sound as rain.
Both upper bands are modulated by slow oscillators running at a twentieth and a ninth of a hertz — roughly one cycle every twenty and every nine seconds — set a third of a cycle apart. That offset is deliberate. Rain that swells and fades all at once sounds like somebody moving a volume knob; rain where the droplet detail rises slightly after the body does sounds like weather.
Turning the slider up does not simply raise the level. The low-pass on the middle band opens from 3.2 kHz to 7 kHz and the droplet layer gains nearly three times its weight, because heavier rain genuinely has more high-frequency energy in it. A downpour is brighter, not just louder, and a generator that only changes gain gets that wrong in a way people notice without being able to say why.
The three bands, at half intensity
Printed from the generator itself at the middle slider position. Move the rain slider and the frequencies below move with it — heavier rain is brighter, not merely louder.
| Band | Noise | Filters | Movement |
|---|---|---|---|
| Body — the rumble heard indoors | brown | lowpass at 410 Hz | steady |
| Surface — water hitting the ground | pink | highpass at 300 Hz, lowpass at 5100 Hz | swells every 20s |
| Droplets — what makes it read as rain | white | highpass at 2600 Hz, peaking at 5200 Hz | swells every 9s |
Common questions
Does the rain ever repeat?
No. It is generated continuously rather than played back, so there is no loop point for your ear to find. Two hours of it contains no repeated section anywhere.
Can I have rain without the low rumble?
Turn the rain slider down and the white noise slider up a little: you keep the bright surface detail and lose most of the body. Rain plus a touch of wind is the other combination worth trying.
Why does it sound different from a recording of rain?
A recording carries the room it was made in — the roof, the gutter, the window frame. This is rain without a room, which is why it sits further back. Adding a little brown noise puts some of that weight back.