Sound for Settling
Calming Sounds
Seven beds built live from noise and pure tones — nothing streamed, nothing tracked. Keep the volume lower than feels interesting; the point is to stop noticing it.
Now playing
Silence
Sound beds
How to use these well
- For sleep, choose brown noise or slow surf and set a 45-minute timer — continuous audio all night keeps some sleepers in lighter stages.
- For focus, keep the bed quieter than your typing. If you can pick out detail in it, it is competing for attention.
- For anxiety, pair a bed with the extended-exhale pattern on the breathwork page rather than using sound alone.
- Drones suit meditation; noise suits masking. Do not expect one to do the other's job.
In short
Seven calming sound beds generated live in your browser — rain, slow surf, wind, brown noise, hearth warmth and two meditation drones, with volume and a sleep timer.
- Speakers with some low-end body suit brown noise better than laptop speakers.
- Keep headphone volume conservative — a bed you sleep in for hours at high volume is a hearing risk.
- If a sound becomes irritating after ten minutes, it is the wrong one; switch rather than persevering.
- Tinnitus sufferers often prefer the brighter beds (rain, wind) to the deep ones.
7
Sound beds
0 kB
Streamed audio
45 min
Longest timer
Masking noise with noise is old technology — fountains in cloisters, wind chimes on verandas, the deliberate placement of running water in Persian and Japanese gardens. What all of them exploit is that the ear is far more disturbed by intermittent, informational sound than by continuous, uninformative sound. A neighbour's conversation is worse than a motorway.
The twentieth century gave the phenomenon names and colours: white noise with equal energy per frequency, pink noise weighted toward the low end, brown noise deeper still. Sleep and focus research generally finds modest but real benefits, particularly for people in noisy environments, and the deeper colours are usually preferred because the human ear finds high-frequency hiss fatiguing.
Drones come from a different lineage entirely — the tanpura of Indian classical music, the bourdon of medieval organum, Tibetan bowls — where a sustained tone functions as a reference the mind can rest against rather than a mask.
Questions Readers Ask
Is anything downloaded or streamed?
No. Every bed is generated in your browser from filtered noise or oscillators, so it works offline and uses no bandwidth.
Can I leave it running overnight?
You can, but a timer is usually kinder to sleep architecture. Set forty-five minutes and let it fade out.
Why does the surf bed rise and fall?
A slow low-frequency oscillator sways the volume on an eleven-second cycle, which reads to the ear as a tide.
Will it play with the screen off?
On most desktop browsers yes; many mobile browsers suspend audio when the tab is backgrounded.