Sleep sounds
Binaural beats for sleep
Let's be straight before anything else: the honest version of this page is shorter and a good deal less flattering than most of what you will find written on the subject.
In short
A binaural beat is something your brain constructs when each ear receives a slightly different tone, so it exists only over headphones and vanishes the moment you use a speaker. The sleep evidence is limited, mixed and mostly short-term, and Tock does not include a binaural beats track, partly because sleeping in headphones brings problems of its own.
- Tones required
- 2Tones requiredOne per ear, a few hertz apart, plus headphones to keep them separate.
- Binaural tracks in Tock
- 0Binaural tracks in TockOut of 63 fall-asleep sounds. The tonal drones are the nearest thing.
- Music beds instead
- 9Music beds insteadIncluding a cello drone and two singing bowls tuned a hair apart.
No web preview of this one
Binaural beats is in the app, but we have not put a clip of it on this page. The pages that do carry one are white noise, rainfall, ocean, fan, fireplace and piano.
The beat is in your head, not in the room
Send 200 Hz to one ear and 204 Hz to the other and you perceive a pulsing at 4 Hz that is not present in either signal. Your auditory system builds it from the difference. That part is well established and genuinely interesting.
It also means headphones are not optional. Play the same two tones through a speaker and they mix in the air before they reach you, producing an ordinary acoustic beat, which is a different phenomenon with none of the claims attached to it.
Tock does not ship a binaural beats track
None of the 63 fall-asleep sounds are binaural beats, and that is a decision rather than an oversight. The library is built for a phone on a nightstand playing through its own speaker, which is the setup binaural beats cannot work in.
What is in there instead: a cello drone that is one long bowed note, two singing bowls tuned slightly apart so they beat against each other acoustically, an om drone, and a deep space pad. Those give you sustained tone and slow movement without asking you to sleep in hardware.
The evidence is small, mixed and mostly short
There are published studies on binaural beats and sleep or anxiety, and some of them report positive results. Read the methods and the pattern is consistent: small samples, often a couple of dozen people, short exposure, self-reported outcomes, and control conditions that vary a lot between papers.
Reviews of that literature tend to land on the same conclusion, which is that the effects are inconsistent and the studies are not yet good enough to settle it. That is not a takedown. It is just a long way from the confidence with which the internet usually presents this.
Nothing here is medical advice and nothing in Tock is. If your sleep has been bad for weeks, a doctor is a better use of your time than any audio track.
Headphones in bed are the practical objection
Even granting the effect entirely, you still have to wear headphones for hours while unconscious. Earbuds fall out or press into your ear against a pillow. Over-ear cups do not survive a side sleeper. Cables end up somewhere you did not put them.
And whatever is playing has to keep playing all night for the effect to persist, which means volume and duration decisions that are worth taking seriously. If you want to try it anyway, keep it to the wind-down rather than the whole night.
What most people actually came here for
Read enough posts about binaural beats and the underlying want is usually clear: a low, unchanging sound to stop thinking against. Brown noise does that, works on a speaker, needs no hardware, and its mechanism is plain masking rather than anything contested.
If it was the pulse you liked, ocean waves have a real one. If it was the sustained tone, the cello and the singing bowls are right there. None of those require anything in your ears and none of them need a research paper to justify.
Who it suits, and who it does not
Worth trying if
- People who already know they respond to it and sleep comfortably in headphones
- Daytime use, where headphones are not a problem and nothing is riding on the outcome
- A one week experiment, treated as an experiment rather than as a fix
Probably skip it if
- Side sleepers, and anyone who has ever woken up with an earbud somewhere in the sheets
- Masking a noisy street, which a plain low noise does far better and with no hardware at all
- Anyone hoping for a documented treatment for a sleep problem, because this is not that
How it behaves once it is running
- It is one of the 22 bundled recordings, so it plays from the app with nothing to fetch.
- You can layer up to four sounds at once and save the result as a mix, so a bed you like is one tap the next night.
- It fades with the sleep timer, and the good-night screen dims itself to near black after twenty seconds so the phone stops being a light source.
What to put underneath it
Four sounds at a time is the limit, and three is usually the sweet spot. These are the pairings that hold up.
- Brown noiseThe honest substitute. If what you actually wanted was a low, steady, unchanging bed to stop thinking against, this is it, and it works fine on a speaker across the room.
- OceanIf the appeal was the slow pulse rather than the frequency claims, surf gives you a real one about ten seconds long, with nothing in your ears.
- PianoIf what drew you in was tone rather than noise, the music group is where that lives in Tock. The cello and the singing bowls are the closest in feel to a sustained beat.
Questions people ask
Do binaural beats actually work for sleep?
The perceptual effect is real and well documented. Whether it improves sleep is much less clear: the studies are small, short and inconsistent, and reviews of them generally say the evidence is not strong enough to draw a conclusion. Trying it is reasonable. Relying on it is not.
Can I get binaural beats through a speaker?
No. The whole effect depends on each ear receiving a different tone, and a speaker sends both to both ears. What you get instead is a normal acoustic beat between two close frequencies, which sounds pleasant but is a different thing entirely.
Does Tock have anything similar?
Not binaural, but there is sustained tonal material: a cello drone with no attack in it, singing bowls tuned a hair apart so they beat against each other in the air, an om drone and a deep space pad. All of them play through a speaker and none of them need headphones.
What is the safest thing to try instead?
Brown noise at a moderate level with the phone across the room. The mechanism is straightforward masking, the effect is audible in about ten seconds, and there is nothing to wear. If you want something with movement in it, layer rain or ocean waves on top.
Related sounds
Nearby textures worth trying on a night this one does not land.
- Brown 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.
- Pink noisePink noise drops about 3 dB with every octave, which works out to equal energy in every octave and is close to how a lot of natural sound is distributed, from rain to wind in trees to tyres on a wet road. It reads as a balanced hush rather than a hiss or a rumble, which is why it is usually the right thing to try before you commit to either extreme.
- OceanRolling surf is broadband like rain, but it breathes, cresting and receding on a cycle of about ten seconds, and a lot of people find that slow rise easier to let go of than a flat hush. The cost is that the level moves, so it masks less reliably at the quiet end of every cycle than steady noise does.
- PianoSlow piano gives your attention somewhere pleasant to go while you are letting go of the day, which is why it works so well as a wind-down. Every note also begins with a hammer hitting a string, and those sudden starts are exactly what keeps a light sleeper coming back up, so Tock fades it out rather than running it to your alarm.
Elsewhere on the site
A different corner of the same problem.
- Head to headApple Health Sleep vs AutoSleepIf you wear your Apple Watch to bed and want to know how long you slept, Apple's own tracking is free and already doing it. AutoSleep is for the person who wants that night pulled apart into far more detail than Apple would ever ship.
- FeaturesApple HealthTock reads Apple Health for sleep, heart rate, resting heart rate, HRV, blood oxygen, respiratory rate and wrist temperature, and shows them on the night they belong to. It can also write its own nights back into Health, but that setting defaults to off.
- Tock for youLight sleepersYou wake at everything, and then you are awake for forty minutes at 3am doing arithmetic on how much is left. By morning you cannot say what woke you, only that something did, several times.
- 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 sleep trackers that don't need a watchTock is the best sleep tracker without a watch. Leave the phone on the nightstand and it uses the microphone and accelerometer all night, classifies snores, coughs and sleep talking on device, and hands you a report plus the audio in the morning. SleepScore is the strongest alternative if you would rather nothing listened to the room.
- Wake timesWaking up at 8:00amBedtimes by sleep cycle for a 8:00am alarm.
You cannot just decide to fall asleep
Binaural beats is one of 63 sounds in Tock. Layer four at a time, save the mix, and let the alarm wake you at a lighter moment in the morning.