Wake tones
Gentle alarm sounds
Gentle gets a bad name because people try it in the wrong order: pick a soft tone, keep the same fixed ring time, sleep straight through it, and conclude that soft tones are useless.
In short
A gentle alarm works when it catches you at a light moment and fails when it lands in the heaviest part of your night, which is a timing problem rather than a volume one. Tock watches movement and sound across the 30 minutes before your alarm and rings early at a lighter moment if it finds one, with your set time as the fallback.
- How early Tock can ring
- 30 minHow early Tock can ringOnly at a lighter moment
- Signals smart wake reads
- 2Signals smart wake readsMovement and sound
- Wake tones to pick from
- 18Wake tones to pick fromSeveral of them soft
Nothing to play on this page
This page is about a kind of wake tone rather than one specific sound, so there is no single clip to put here. Beacon, Kalimba, Marimba and Musicbox all have one.
How it rings
A gentle tone starts close to the noise floor of the room, rises slowly instead of spiking, and repeats without ever getting hard at the front, so it works on you quietly for a while and only stops being pleasant after a minute or two of being ignored.
The case for soft is really a case about timing
Being pulled out of deep sleep is what makes a morning feel awful, and a louder alarm does not solve that. It just does the same damage more efficiently. The variable worth changing is the moment the alarm arrives.
That is what smart wake is for. Tock reads movement through the accelerometer and sound through the microphone, and inside the last 30 minutes before your alarm it rings at a moment that looks lighter. When it never finds one, your set time still fires.
No player on this page. Gentle is a way of setting the alarm rather than a single tone. The two soft tones you can actually hear are on the Kalimba and Music box pages.
Where gentle honestly fails
Some people sleep through soft tones no matter how well timed the ring is. Shift workers on a wrecked schedule, anyone chronically short on sleep, and plenty of perfectly ordinary heavy sleepers fall into this.
If two weeks of a soft tone has produced two weeks of near misses, stop optimising it. Move to Beacon, keep smart wake on, and you still get the better timing without gambling on the tone.
- You wake up naturally before the alarm at least a few days a week: gentle is a good bet
- You have overslept a soft tone more than once: pick something clearer
- You are already using three alarms to get up: fix the ending before you touch the tone
The mission is the safety net under a soft tone
A quiet alarm you can dismiss with a swipe is the easiest thing in the world to sleep through, because the dismissal is a reflex you have practised hundreds of times. Add a wake-up mission and the reflex stops working, because the ringing does not stop until something is solved.
That is what makes gentle safe rather than reckless. The tone stops being the only thing standing between you and another hour.
Who should set this one
Worth setting if
- People who wake up on their own most days and want the alarm as a backstop
- Anyone whose morning mood is wrecked by being startled
- Bedrooms shared with someone on a different schedule
- Winding down a habit of stacking five increasingly aggressive alarms
Pair it with a mission
TilesWake-up mission
Tiles is quiet, visual and needs no talking or stamping around, so the tone can stay soft while you finish it. Of the nine missions it is the least jarring way to prove you are actually conscious.
All nine missionsQuestions people ask
Is there a gentle alarm that actually wakes you up?
A gentle tone rung at a lighter moment wakes most people. The same tone at a fixed time in the middle of deep sleep does not. Timing is the part that changes the outcome.
Will smart wake make me get up earlier than I wanted?
Only up to 30 minutes early, and only when it sees a lighter moment. Most mornings the difference is a handful of minutes. Turn it off and the alarm rings at exactly the time you set.
Which Tock tones count as gentle?
Kalimba and Music box are the two softest, and there are others in the set of 18 that sit between soft and clear. You can also load your own audio if you have something specific in mind.
Does Tock have a free version?
No. After onboarding there is a 3-day trial, then a subscription from $39.99 a year.
Other wake tones
Eighteen ship with the app. These are the ones worth reading about first.
- KalimbaKalimba is Tock's thumb-piano wake tone: warm plucked notes with a short woody decay that lift you rather than startle you. It still runs on Apple's AlarmKit, so a silent switch, an active Focus and a closed app make no difference to whether it goes off.
- Music boxMusic box is Tock's slowest and most nostalgic wake tone, a thin bell-like melody that unwinds instead of alerting. It rings reliably through silent mode because Tock's alarms run on Apple's AlarmKit, but as a tone it is the weakest choice in the set for anyone who genuinely sleeps hard.
- Sunrise alarmA sunrise alarm clock is a bedside lamp that brightens over roughly 20 to 30 minutes before your set time, and the light is the part you are paying for. Tock is an iPhone app with no light hardware at all, so it takes the timing half instead: a soft wake tone rung at a lighter moment inside the last 30 minutes rather than at a fixed time.
- Nature alarm soundsBirds, water and weather make calm wake tones and carry one specific failure: a natural sound is easy for a sleeping brain to fold into a dream rather than treat as an alarm. Tock counters that in two places, by scheduling the alarm through Apple's AlarmKit so it lands on the system full-screen alert, and by keeping it ringing until a wake-up mission is done.
Elsewhere on the site
A different corner of the same problem.
- Head to headAlarmy vs the iPhone Clock appIf you get up when your alarm goes off, the Clock app is the honest answer and Alarmy is friction you don't need. If you dismiss alarms in your sleep and it has already cost you something, Alarmy's tasks are the only thing on this page that changes the outcome.
- FeaturesWake-up missionsA wake-up mission is a small task that has to be completed before the alarm will stop. Tock ships 9 of them in 3 families: mind, body and place. The alarm keeps ringing the whole time the task is on screen.
- Sleep soundsBrown noiseBrown noise puts almost all of its energy in the low end, dropping roughly 6 dB with every octave you climb, so it reads as a rumble or distant surf rather than a hiss. That low weight is exactly why it covers traffic, footsteps and a neighbour's bass better than white noise does, and also why it can feel like pressure if your room is already quiet.
- Tock for youNight owlsYou are wide awake at 1am and useless at 7am, and every piece of advice you have ever read starts with going to bed earlier, which you have done, repeatedly, while staring at the ceiling.
- AlternativesTock vs PillowStay with Pillow if you track on your wrist, because it runs on the Watch and Tock does not. Choose Tock if your phone is the only thing on the nightstand and you want the alarm to be the centre of the product rather than a feature of the tracker.
- RoundupsThe best free alarm apps for iPhoneThe best free alarm app for iPhone is the Clock app that came with it. It is free forever, it rings through silent mode and a Focus, and it has never failed. Alarmy is the best free option if you need an alarm that is hard to turn off. Tock is not free and is listed last for that reason.
An alarm that rings on silent, and then asks for something
Tock is built on Apple AlarmKit, so it rings through silent mode and a Focus with the app closed. Then it keeps ringing until you solve one of nine missions.