Wake tones
Kalimba alarm sound
A kalimba is a thumb piano, a row of metal tines over a wooden box, and it is about the friendliest thing you can be woken by that still counts as an alarm rather than a lullaby.
In short
Kalimba 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.
- Wake tones to choose from
- 18Wake tones to choose fromKalimba is one of the softest
- Signals smart wake listens to
- 2Signals smart wake listens toMovement and sound
- Smart wake window
- 30 minSmart wake windowIt only rings early inside it
How it rings
Each note arrives with a soft plucked attack and a short woody decay, the phrase steps up a little every time it repeats, and the whole thing stays genuinely pleasant for about half a minute before repetition starts to wear on you.
Plucked beats struck, for a first sound of the day
The tines of a kalimba have almost no percussive click at the front of the note. You get the body of the sound before you get the edge of it, which is why the same melody on a bell or a marimba feels sharper than this does.
That soft front edge is the whole reason people describe waking to a kalimba as being lifted rather than yanked. Nothing about it is quiet, particularly. It just does not arrive with a bang.
Soft only survives if the timing is doing the work
A gentle tone dropped into the deepest part of your night will lose. Smart wake exists to stop that happening: Tock watches movement and sound across the 30 minutes before your alarm and rings at a lighter moment if it finds one, with your set time as the fallback.
Catch a lighter moment and Kalimba is plenty. Land in the heaviest sleep of the night and no plucked note in the world is going to be enough.
The tone that survives repetition wins
Alarm tones are not judged on the first morning, they are judged on the fortieth. A tone you find pleasant is a tone you leave alone, and leaving it alone means you keep the alarm you actually set instead of fiddling with it every week.
Kalimba is one of the few in the set that people report still liking after months. That is a real advantage even though it sounds like a soft one.
If you have ever slept through this kind of tone, read the loud alarm sounds page before you commit to it.
Who should set this one
Worth setting if
- People who wake up easily and mostly need permission to get up
- Sleeping next to someone who gets up an hour after you do
- Anyone who has started dreading the sound of their own alarm
- Weekend alarms, where being late by five minutes costs nothing
Pair it with a mission
PhraseWake-up mission
Typing a phrase back is the calmest mission Tock has, and Kalimba does not fight you while you do it. Together they make a morning that starts slowly on purpose, which suits a foggy waker more than a dead-to-the-world one.
All nine missionsQuestions people ask
Is Kalimba loud enough to wake a heavy sleeper?
On its own, often not. Pair it with a wake-up mission so the alarm cannot be dismissed with a swipe, or choose Beacon and keep Kalimba for weekends.
What actually is a kalimba?
A thumb piano. Metal tines of different lengths mounted over a wooden resonating box, played with the thumbs. The short warm decay you hear in the tone is the box doing its job.
Does a gentle tone still ring through a Focus?
Yes. The tone has nothing to do with it. Tock's alarms come from Apple's AlarmKit, so every wake tone in the app rings through silent mode and through a Focus, gentle ones included.
Other wake tones
Eighteen ship with the app. These are the ones worth reading about first.
- 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.
- Gentle alarm soundsA 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.
- MarimbaMarimba is the rounded wooden-bar tone everybody recognises from stock phone alarms, and Tock ships its own version of it. Familiarity cuts both ways: your brain identifies it instantly, and it has also had years of practice sleeping through it. The alarm itself still rings on Apple's AlarmKit, so silent mode and a Focus change nothing.
- 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.
- RoundupsThe best alarm apps for heavy sleepersTock is the best alarm app for heavy sleepers: it rings on AlarmKit, so it gets through silent mode and a Focus, and it keeps ringing until you finish a small task. Alarmy is the real rival and the better pick if you want the widest set of dismissal tasks or a free tier to test the idea on.
- Wake timesWaking up at 4:30amBedtimes by sleep cycle for a 4:30am alarm.
- BedtimesGoing to bed at 12:30amWhere to put the alarm after a 12:30am lights-out.
- Sleep by ageHow much sleep teenagers needThe American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends that teenagers aged 13 to 18 years sleep 8 to 10 hours per 24 hours on a regular basis. The obstacle is a genuine biological shift: the adolescent circadian rhythm runs later, so a teenager cannot reliably fall asleep at the time an early school start requires.
- NapsThe 10 minute napA 10 minute nap lifts alertness without taking you into slow wave sleep, so you wake up clear rather than groggy. It is the safest nap to take close to work or driving, and it does nothing for memory consolidation, which needs considerably longer.
- Head to headthe iPhone Clock app vs Sleep as AndroidYour phone already decided this. Sleep as Android has no iOS version and Apple's Clock app has no Android version, so unless you're switching phones over an alarm clock, the answer is whichever one you can install.
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.