🎧 Sleep sounds

Fall asleep to it.
Then it steps aside.

Eighteen calming sounds, generated live on your iPhone. They play while you drift off, fade out on schedule, and leave the room quiet before snore detection begins.

How it works

One sound, four stages.

Sleep sounds play during a delayed start. Pick a sound and a delay of 15 to 60 minutes; NightSnore handles the rest.

Play

Your sound plays until two minutes before the delay ends, at the volume you set.

Fade out

Over 60 seconds it fades to silence — no abrupt stop to jolt you awake.

Calibrate

For another 60 seconds NightSnore re-learns how quiet your room is now. This step can’t be skipped.

Detect

Snore detection begins. The sound is long gone, so it never ends up in your recording.

Tap “Start detecting now” and the sound fades out within seconds — calibration still runs before detection starts.

The research

Why sound helps you drift off.

Falling asleep somewhere unfamiliar or noisy is hard: every creak and passing car competes for your attention. In a randomized sleep-lab study, steady broadband sound at a moderate level (about 46 dB) shortened the time healthy adults took to fall asleep by a median of 38% compared with ordinary room noise.[1]

The kind of sound matters too. In a brain-imaging study, listening to natural sounds — compared with artificial ones — went with a relaxed, outward-directed state of attention and more rest-and-digest (parasympathetic) nervous activity.[2] That’s why most of NightSnore’s sounds come from nature: rain, waves, a campfire, a mountain stream.

These are small studies, and sound is not a treatment for insomnia. But for winding down, the evidence points in a friendly direction.

Time to fall asleep (median)
Ordinary room noise (~40 dB)19 min
Steady broadband sound (~46 dB)13 min

18 healthy adults, randomized crossover design. [1]

A night with NightSnore
Falling asleep: your sound plays
60 s: fade out
60 s: room-noise calibration
Rest of the night: quiet room, snore detection
By design

Why it doesn’t play all night.

Here the evidence turns cautious. A 2021 systematic review of 38 studies rated the evidence that continuous noise improves sleep as very low quality, with results ranging from helpful to disruptive.[3]

A 2026 sleep-lab study from the University of Pennsylvania went further: pink noise played all night at 50 dB was associated with nearly 19 fewer minutes of REM sleep. Combined with traffic noise, it shortened both deep and REM sleep — and earplugs protected sleep far better.[4]

So NightSnore uses sound only where it looks most useful — the minutes when you’re falling asleep — and then it stops. There’s a practical reason, too: a sound playing all night would sit right on top of the snores you want to measure.

Listen

Have a listen.

Two-minute excerpts rendered with the same synthesis algorithms as the app. Keep your volume low — these sounds are meant to sit quietly in the background.

Nature
Indoors & on the move
Meditative
Classic noise
Under the hood

Generated, not recorded.

None of these sounds is a recording. Each one is synthesized in real time on your iPhone from shaped noise, resonant filters and randomly timed details — raindrops, crackling embers, a distant bird, the click of rail joints.

A fresh random seed every night means the sound is never quite the same twice, and there’s no loop seam to catch your ear at 1 a.m. And because there are no audio files to ship, all eighteen sounds add almost nothing to the app’s download size.

18 sounds in four groups: nature, indoors & on the move, meditative, classic noise
0 audio files: everything is synthesized on the device
Different every night: a new random seed, never a loop
  • Set it just loud enough to soften the room — not to fill it.
  • Keep your phone where it already goes for monitoring: on the nightstand, 20–50 cm away, microphone toward you.
  • Sound only plays during the delay; it never runs all night.
  • Using it near a child? Keep it especially quiet.

Sleep sounds are a comfort feature, not a medical treatment. If you have ongoing trouble sleeping, talk to a doctor.

Good to know

Keep it soft.

Volume is the one thing worth getting right. When researchers measured 14 infant sleep machines at full volume, every one exceeded 50 dBA at 30 cm, and three exceeded 85 dBA — a level that, over a whole night, goes beyond occupational noise limits for adults.[5]

Help pick the next sound.

Rate the samples and tell us what you’d like to hear. About three minutes, completely anonymous.

Take the survey →
NightSnore

Drift off. Then measure.

Sleep sounds are built into NightSnore.
Pick a sound, set a delay, and let yourself fall asleep.

Download on the App Store

iOS 17.6 and later · Free to download · Not a medical device

References
  1. Messineo L, Taranto-Montemurro L, Sands SA, Oliveira Marques MD, Azabarzin A, Wellman DA. "Broadband sound administration improves sleep onset latency in healthy subjects in a model of transient insomnia." Frontiers in Neurology 8:718 (2017). doi:10.3389/fneur.2017.00718
  2. Gould van Praag CD, Garfinkel SN, Sparasci O, et al. "Mind-wandering and alterations to default mode network connectivity when listening to naturalistic versus artificial sounds." Scientific Reports 7:45273 (2017). doi:10.1038/srep45273
  3. Riedy SM, Smith MG, Rocha S, Basner M. "Noise as a sleep aid: A systematic review." Sleep Medicine Reviews 55:101385 (2021). doi:10.1016/j.smrv.2020.101385
  4. Basner M, Smith MG, Cordoza M, et al. "Efficacy of pink noise and earplugs for mitigating the effects of intermittent environmental noise exposure on sleep." Sleep (2026). doi:10.1093/sleep/zsag001
  5. Hugh SC, Wolter NE, Propst EJ, Gordon KA, Cushing SL, Papsin BC. "Infant sleep machines and hazardous sound pressure levels." Pediatrics 133(4):677–681 (2014). doi:10.1542/peds.2013-3617