Wake tones
Nature alarm sounds
Birdsong at 6am is a lovely idea right up to the morning the birds turn up inside the dream you were already having and you sleep on for another forty minutes.
In short
Birds, 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.
- Fall-asleep sounds in Tock
- 63Fall-asleep sounds in TockWhere most of the nature audio lives
- Sounds you can layer at once
- 4Sounds you can layer at onceSave the blend as a mix
- Wake tones on the alarm side
- 18Wake tones on the alarm sideA different library entirely
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
Nature tones arrive with almost no attack, come and go at unpredictable intervals rather than on a beat, and stay agreeable more or less indefinitely, which is exactly why people love them and exactly why they fail.
How a bird ends up inside the dream
A sleeping brain is busy explaining incoming sound rather than reacting to it, and a natural sound is trivially easy to explain. Rain becomes weather in the dream, a bird becomes a bird in the dream, and nothing needs to wake up for the story to hold together.
An artificial tone is harder to absorb. Nothing in the world you are dreaming about makes that noise, so the explanation fails and you surface. That is the whole reason alarms have sounded synthetic for a century.
Nature earns its keep at the other end of the night
Being unremarkable is a flaw in an alarm and a virtue in a fall-asleep sound. Tock keeps 63 of them, you can layer four at a time and save the blend, and most of them are generated on the phone sample by sample so they never loop back on themselves.
Use rain to get to sleep and something clearer to get up. The two jobs want opposite things from a sound.
Nothing to play on this page. The four wake tones with a preview on this site are Beacon, Kalimba, Marimba and Music box.
Make it keep ringing and the risk mostly goes away
The danger with a nature alarm is not that you fail to hear it, it is that you hear it and stay asleep. Tock does not stop until a mission is finished, so a tone your dream absorbed keeps going anyway, and it keeps going long past the point where any dream can accommodate it.
Add smart wake on top and it rings at a lighter moment inside the last 30 minutes, when your brain is doing far less dream-building in the first place.
Who should set this one
Worth setting if
- People who find electronic tones stressful before they are properly awake
- Waking up in daylight, where a bird outside and a bird on the phone agree with each other
- Anyone using a nature soundscape to fall asleep who wants the morning to match
- Weekend and holiday alarms with no hard deadline behind them
Pair it with a mission
Photo a saved spotWake-up mission
A nature tone will not push you out of bed on its own, so make the ending physical. Photographing a spot you saved, the kettle or the bathroom mirror, means the alarm can only stop from somewhere that is not your pillow.
All nine missionsQuestions people ask
Can I use birdsong as my alarm in Tock?
The wake tone library has 18 tones and you can also load your own audio, so a birdsong file you like can be your alarm. Most of the nature audio in Tock sits in the fall-asleep library rather than the alarm side.
Do nature alarms work for heavy sleepers?
Not reliably on their own. If you sleep hard, use a clear tone for the alarm and keep the nature sounds for winding down.
Do the sleep sounds loop?
Most are generated on the phone sample by sample as they play, so no two nights sound the same and there is nothing to download. Twenty-two of them are real recordings.
Other wake tones
Eighteen ship with the app. These are the ones worth reading about first.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Annoying alarm soundsAn unbearable alarm tone works for roughly a week. After that you learn to silence it before you are properly conscious, and you are back where you started with a worse mood attached. The durable fix is not a harsher sound, it is making the alarm end somewhere your half-asleep self cannot reach.
Elsewhere on the site
A different corner of the same problem.
- Wake timesWaking up at 4:30amBedtimes by sleep cycle for a 4:30am alarm.
- BedtimesGoing to bed at 2:00amWhere to put the alarm after a 2:00am lights-out.
- Sleep by ageHow much sleep adults needThe American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends that adults sleep 7 or more hours per night on a regular basis to promote optimal health. It is expressed as a minimum rather than a range because the evidence supports a lower bound far more firmly than it supports an ideal figure.
- NapsThe 60 minute napA 60 minute nap includes a substantial amount of slow wave sleep, which is useful for recovery and for some kinds of memory, and it usually ends before the cycle completes. That means the benefit is real and the wake-up is often groggy, so it suits situations where the hour afterwards is flexible.
- Head to headthe iPhone Clock app vs Apple Health SleepThis isn't a choice. The Clock app is the alarm and Apple's Sleep schedule is the plan around it, and if you wear an Apple Watch to bed the Sleep side is the only one of the two that records anything at all.
- FeaturesSmart wakeSmart wake is a 30 minute window before your alarm in which Tock watches for a lighter moment in your sleep and rings as soon as it finds one. If it never finds one, your alarm goes off at the exact time you set.
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.