Bâton de pluies transforms the random movements of raindrops into a living musical score. As the rain activates a sonic grid, a form of collaborative composition emerges with a material that eludes all human intention.

Bâton de pluies* (Rain Stick) is an installation featuring two monitors. An animated score appears on one screen, activated by filmed rain on the second screen. Bâton de pluies is based on the idea of working with random processes that cannot be controlled.
The starting point is a keyboard exposed to the rain—not as a recording instrument, but as a sensitive interface for unpredictable events. The rain becomes the trigger for musical structures.
Every drop is a unique, unrepeatable event. It activates a graphic grid that captures the impulses and translates them into notes, rhythms, and sound textures.

This is how aleatoric music comes into being, music that, as it sounds, generates its own “score,” as it were. Compositional control is replaced by a system that absorbs and transforms external events and, in a state of constant flux, can no longer be attributed to any single author. Rain serves as the ideal source material here, as it is more unintentional, unpredictable, and chaotic than any algorithmically generated randomness. The installation thus draws on traditions of aleatoric music and process-based art, in which chance is understood not as a disruptive factor but as a constitutive principle.
The work is based on the everyday observation of rain beneath a skylight. Bâton de pluies formalizes and amplifies this perception through the interdependence of image and sound.
As chance becomes an effective artistic medium, authorship in this context is not abolished but repositioned: as a mediation between event and translation. For Vient and Lemière, this opens up a space of co-creation in which unpredictability becomes a productive condition of aesthetic experience.
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* A bâton de pluies (rain stick) is a tubular rattle. The instrument imitates the sound of falling rain by allowing small seeds or pebbles to trickle slowly through an internal lattice.