The Rain Drum is an invention in the concept stage by Dong Min Park. It’s an umbrella that features various drum sounds, promising to make your rainy day much more interesting.

When the rain hits an area on the umbrella, the stretched wax cloth creates a sound, just like it would on a regular drum.

In a regular drum pattern, the bass and snare sound less often than the hihats, and the toms somewhere in between. This problem is solved by having different-sized areas for each sound, increasing or decreasing the frequency of each sound being ‘played’.

I’m not sure if this drum-controller-meets-raingear is able to fold down to a more compact size (it looks like it doesn’t), and I’m not so sure that the irregular pattern would be all that pleasant to listen to, but it definitely an interesting concept. Perhaps a more Brian Eno ambient sort of thing might be more appropriate, especially on a dreary, rainy day.

• The VAX77 folding keyboard
• The Silent Drum controller
• Auto-synchronization of metronomes