This Mind-Bending Video Of 'Rain' Falling Is Actually Something Much Cooler

Anyone who's experienced a true thunderstorm knows the acoustic complexity of rain. What sounds like a cohesive force is really just a bunch of individual notes, the effect of many single droplets falling on various surfaces at a rapid pace.

This is the schema underpinning "Amaoto no Yurai," or "The Origin Of The Sound of Rain," an audio-visual creation so ingenious it's a wonder we haven't seen something like it before. Made for a Japanese TV program by the acclaimed digital designer Yugo Nakamura, the video above seems to track an actual rainstorm.

But that's not what's going on at all. Using nature's own logic, Nakamura simply spliced together audio of droplets falling on a few different objects -- a snail, a flower, a brick -- to prove that the complex natural force can be approximated by working piecemeal. Run enough of the samples together, more than 10 million times as Nakamura does, and you've got what sounds an awful lot like a genuine shower.