The perfect storm

It was a sleepless night for many people as Storm Dudley blew in with fierce winds. As the American poet Clara W Raymond described in The Wild Wind (1877), “Oh, the wind came howling at our house-door/ Like a maddened fiend set free/ He pushed and struggled with gasp and roar/ For an angry wind was he!”

A wire in the wind can make particularly spooky noises, whirling the air into processions of little eddies at frequencies that can be heard as different sounds. Sebastian Junger described the effect in his novel The Perfect Storm: “Fishermen say they can gauge how fast the wind . . . is blowing by the sound it makes against the wire stays and outrigger cables. A scream means the wind is around Force 9 on the Beaufort Scale, 40 or 50 knots. Force 10 is a shriek. Force 11 is a moan. Over Force 11 is something the fishermen don’t want to hear.”

Winds have been used to drive musical instruments. The great inventor Heron of Alexandria, who lived in about 10AD to 70AD, described a windwheel, using a tiny windmill to power a piston, forcing air through organ pipes to create music “like the sound of a flute”. The Aeolian harp used tight strings fixed over a sound box, and when the wind blew the strings vibrated and created haunting notes.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was quite captivated by the instrument in his cottage at Clevedon in Somerset, celebrating it in his poem The Eolian Harp in August 1795: “And now, its strings/ Boldlier swept, the long sequacious notes/ Over delicious surges sink and rise/ Such a soft floating witchery of sound.”

Most ambitious of all was probably Salvador Dalí’s idea of an organ powered by the Tramontane wind blowing down from the Pyrenees. The organ was to be installed on top of a remote hill in northern Spain, where the wind would blast the organ pipes into wild sounds, but his project remained unfulfilled. A plan to resurrect the project in 2004 failed because of local opposition to the noise it was feared that the organ would make.

from The Times UK 17-2-22