Two tests for creating wind and tree rustles

Here’s two process takes of me trying to create wind gusts and loops from various sources.

1: Wind gusts with hand-controlled DC motor:

Swooshing a small DC motor with a piece of felt attached to the shaft in front of a microphone. Somewhat nice, but was hard to separate the mechanical noise in a meaningful way. But the idea makes sense. I also tried to have the motor ‘excite’ some packing paper to simulate some rustling leaves, but it wasn’t quite satisfactory.
Outside the frame I am controlling the speed of the motor with a little controller a friend made. Years back I made an Arduino controller for motors that I could control from Max/Pure Data, but this is much more immediate - and less interface hassle.

2) Simulated density of rustling leaves:

I rustled a house plant by hand to simulate some rustling leaves, but as you can hear in the beginning of the audio clip above, it sounds plasticy and inorganic.
I put this through a Supercollider patch I wrote that granularly mangles it and disperses the pitch to get some more organic textures, which, when processed further and mixed in with other ambience beds, make for a quite pleasing texture.

The plant in question: