The Sound of Water

An exploration of the music contained in water

It was when I was composing a piece on the guitar recently that I thought to include a natural source for the rhythm section instead of using a drum machine in the intro. What I had in mind was calm and dreamy so I needed something quiet but noticeable.

I knew then that I wanted the sound of dripping water in the piece. The quiet drip-drip-drip would be perfect to complement the guitar melody.

I was in my friend’s house at the time and the door to the restroom stood ajar. From within, I heard exactly what I wanted.

No, no, no — not that. The restroom was empty at the time. I could hear water dripping into the drain under the wash basin. I was aware that this wasn’t the magical location I had imagined I would capture the perfect sound, but the sound itself was just what I needed. I took my microphone and went in to the restroom like a madman and came out with a wide grin. My friend sitting outside was quite disturbed, to say the least.

I had exactly what I was looking for. I used the raw recording to get a tempo-synced water drip and I had a basic rhythm ready. I added the guitar part to create a 4–5 polyrhythm and I was done. I fell in love with the sound of water right then.

Water has been used in so many different ways in music that I don’t think I could cover every one of them. Let’s see how far I get.

Whole instruments have been designed with water as a primary component. The most popular one is probably the glass harmonica. It’s played by running your wet finger across the rims of water-filled glasses to create a beautiful tone. In Benjamin Franklin’s (yes, him) design, a conical length of glass rotates on a spindle while you play it like you would play a piano — just place your finger at a point to sound a pitch. Of course, your finger needs to be wet for this to work.

The water-instrument that I’m more familiar with is the hydraulophone. If you haven’t heard its sound, please do before continuing. It’s quite magical to see how water jets can be used to make music. It almost always consists of a tube with holes, from which water spurts out in jets. When one of the holes is closed with a finger or hand, the instrument produces a tone. It’s like playing a piano whose keys are water jets! This instrument does get the musician wet. There are many variants where the musician can stand while only getting his hands wet and play it like a vibraphone but sometimes the performer is sitting submerged in a pool, enclosed by a circular tube that is the instrument. I know — you might find that image funny. In defence of the swimming performer, the music makes up for it.

Then there are percussion instruments called water drums. They use gourds cut in half and placed hollow-side down in tubs of water. When the gourds are struck, they create a deep and resonant sound rich in bass. I found out about this instrument listening to African drumming. It is so simple and so powerful at the same time.

Water has many sounds and many faces in the world of music. These sounds are so easy to make that practically anyone can make a song using only water.

A simple splash can be used as a percussive sound. Fill a bucket of water and you have an instrument with you. I’m not only talking about striking the bucket. Strike the water’s surface and you’ll have something you can readily use to create a beat. Splash it hard once and softly 3 more times to create a 4-beat pulse. Repeat this with variation and you are ready to take the stage as a percussionist. There are so many possibilities.

It’s about finding the right sound for what you want to express. Use your creativity to create subtle variations in the sound you’re making. Even if you’re in the pool or in a lake, you can make music right where you are by just splashing the water in different ways. Do it with a group of friends and you’re a rhythm band. You wouldn’t be the first though. Many African musicians perform rhythm improvisations using only the sound of splashing water.

My point is — it is so easy to make music that not having “instruments” is not a valid excuse. The world is an instrument. All you have to do is figure out how to get a sound out of it.

Music is a great source of white noise or at least serves as a good approximation. White noise is technically a random signal, so the intensity across all frequencies is the same. It’s the sound of static you get from FM radio when you tune into an unused frequency. A flowing river or waterfall has much the same noise. I call it noise, and it is, but it can be very calming. The sound of the ocean breaking on the shore is a great soundscape to include in a calm and peaceful piece of music, even though the sound is created by something so rough and violent.

White noise is used by many people to get better sleep and in the case of those experiencing tinnitus (a loud, constant ringing in the ears), white noise can be used as an effective masking sound to give some much-needed relief.

The sound of water feels so non-threatening that it lulls most of us into a state of calm. There’s a reason why people like listening to the ocean. The sound of water can be a source of healing for many.

There are many more water-sounds that can be used to complement your music or even be its mainstay. There’s the sound of water bubbling through a cavity or flowing quietly on the floor. There’s the quiet slap on a small puddle of water or the sound of water filling a container. There’s the thud of a container hitting water or the whip of water being thrown onto a surface. There are ways to interact with water to make sound like running it in your mouth or even gargling. This may sound funny to you but if you knew the wide variety of sounds that has been used in music, and especially in movies, you’d begin to see these as very likely and ordinary sounds to use.

From these and other sounds that use water, I see a few parameters that can be controlled to alter the sound, at least percussively.

One is whether a body of static water is struck or flowing water strikes another body. It amounts to the difference between flowing water and static water — the degree of flow.

Another is the amount of water. More water doesn’t just increase the loudness but the quality of the sound changes as well. It’s the difference between a drip, a trickle and a torrent. They clearly go from one end of the loudness spectrum to the other, but because water is fluid, the number of drops striking at any instant increases and changes the sound from discrete to continuous, thereby changing the complete feeling you associate with the sound. Similarly, a larger body of static water sounds different from a shallow puddle.

There’s also temperature. I had mentioned in an earlier article (The Voice of a Story) that we can identify if water is hot or cold just by listening to it flowing. If you want a sound richer in high frequencies, increase the temperature of the water you’re using.

The container holding the water also affects the resonating properties of the sound. The pitch and frequency characteristics can be varied by changing the container being used. This is why a bucket of water sounds different than, say, a pond.

Finally, there’s the surface that water comes in contact with. Depending on the size, hollowness, thickness, material and other surface-specific traits, the sound will change dramatically. A gourd used in a water drum creates a very different sound compared to our hand slapping the water surface. The added resonating space inside the hollow of the gourd modifies the sound to have much more bass.

These parameters can be helpful in giving the necessary control to the performer when it comes to creating the sounds she wants. This is all just based on my practice. Please let me know through your comments about additions or modifications you think I should have included.

Now, while water can be played as a separate entity, its sound is ubiquitous. Whether something is wet or dry affects its sound to a huge degree. Just like playing on a football or a cricket pitch is affected by moisture and wetness, the sound of instruments, objects and surfaces also varies with wetness.

If you take a dry twig that’s fallen off a tree and snap it in two, it’ll make a loud, cracking sound. Submerge the same twig in water and leave it in there for a minute or two. You already know what’s going to happen. It’s going to becomes a bendier twig with a quieter sound, like a live tree branch. The only change is water.

Instruments made from wood, like guitars and cellos, are also affected in a similar way. The sound of my classical guitar changes if I move from the dry heat of Hyderabad to the more humid weather of Bangalore for a few days. The guitar sounds a lot less snappier, for want of better words.

This is something that you can use intentionally to change the sound of what you’re playing. A little absorbed wetness can make the sound more mellow, if that’s what you’re looking for. But please, do not intentionally do this with your wooden (or leather) instruments! You could ruin the wood. Try this out on dry sticks, twigs or something else inexpensive.

Many drummers pour some water onto their drum heads to make a rattle-like sound when the drum is struck. This is not wetting per se but it it’s another way to use water in combination with a surface to change its sound. I even know some people who pour some water onto their old speaker cones just to listen to how the sound changes (not advisable to try this with your speakers).

And finally, there’s the sound you get from something vibrating inside water. Usually, it takes the form of a water gong, which is a gong that is struck in air and slowly lowered into water. The pitch changes depending on how much it is lowered into water. It could be struck inside the water and brought out too, to create the opposite pitch shift.

Learning from this, we can play any instrument (that can be wetted without damage) in conjunction with the water-air interface. Bone instruments can be used in this way. A bone flute, for example, could be played in air and then lowered into water to change the pitch. In this way, the pitch can be controlled by using the flute’s holes or by using water.

So that gives me seven parameters to work with when I’m using water to make music:

1. Degree of flow
2. Amount of water
3. Temperature of water
4. Dimensions and material of container
5. Dimensions and material of mallet
6. Wetness
7. Degree of submersion

That’s a lot to work with for now. The number of instruments and sounds you could design with just these guidelines could keep your hands full for a while. That’s certainly the case with me.

One thing I haven’t talked about is the physical state that’s water in. I mentioned temperature — but only within a moderate range. I’m sure there are many more ways to use water in the form of steam (like controlling the pitch of a steam engine’s whistle) or ice (like the pagophone, a xylophone made of ice). It’s just so much more convenient to use good-old water though.

There’s other clever ways that people have come up with to use water as a sound source, like a MIDI device that translates ripples in a container of water into electronic sounds.

The one I love the most is the Sea organ at Zadar, Croatia, which uses a network of pipes inside the steps along the coast and makes a sound whenever the ocean waves lap up against the shore and push air through the pipes. What an idea, really! You have to listen to it to believe it.

Inspired? I hope so. Try discovering the music that surrounds you. Only you decide what is an instrument and what isn’t. So use everything at your disposal and bring out the music within you.

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Around Sound turns my personal experiences with music, both as a musician and as a listener, into stories.

Improve your sense of rhythm (How I improved my sense of rhythm: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4) as you read about my journey through the world of rhythm. How’s that for combining a lesson and a story into one? :D

Get a better grasp on notes with my 3-part How I learned to speak with notes series: Melody, Harmony and Connection

You might even find these interesting:
How I use music to remember phone numbers, The Mirror in the Music and The Voice of a Story

You can have a look at all my articles here: Anirudh Venkatesh