Sleep sounds
Brown noise for sleep
Of everything on this list, this is the one people search for by name, usually because somebody online told them it quiets a busy mind. The acoustics behind it are real and easy to explain. What it does to your attention is far less settled, so here are both halves.
Brown 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.
No web preview of this one
Brown noise 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.
- Roll-off per octave
- 6 dBRoll-off per octaveTwice the slope of pink noise. That doubled slope is the whole rumble.
- Sounds with distance
- 42Sounds with distanceFar, Near and Close are a real filter, not a quieter version of the same thing.
- Generated on your phone
- 41Generated on your phoneOf 63 fall-asleep sounds. The other 22 are recordings.
Six decibels an octave is the whole story
Every time the frequency doubles, the power drops by a factor of four. That is what 6 dB per octave means, and it compounds fast. If you set a comfortable level around 100 Hz, then by 800 Hz you are 18 dB down, and by 3 kHz there is almost nothing left to hear.
Line the three up and the family makes sense. White is flat, so nothing rolls off. Pink falls 3 dB per octave, which works out to equal energy in every octave. Brown falls 6, which is twice as steep as pink, and that steepness is the entire character.
The name comes from Robert Brown and Brownian motion, not from the colour. It is sometimes written as red noise for exactly that reason.
Low frequencies are the ones that get through a wall
Walls, doors, carpet and furniture are all reasonably good at absorbing high frequencies and fairly poor at stopping low ones. By the time your neighbour's television reaches your pillow, the consonants are gone and what is left is bass and the rhythm of speech.
So the sound you are trying to cover is already low. Cover has to live in the same range to do anything, and that is the real, unglamorous reason brown noise works better than white against a city street. It is not that it is calmer. It is that it is aimed at the right part of the spectrum.
The masking claims are much stronger than the focus claims
Masking is straightforward acoustics and you can hear it working within about ten seconds. The rest of what gets said about brown noise, that it settles a racing mind or improves concentration, rests on a much thinner base: small samples, short sessions, a lot of self-report, and results that do not always repeat.
That does not mean it is not doing something for you. Plenty of people find a low steady bed genuinely easier to stop thinking against, and there is no harm in that being personal rather than proven. It just means nobody should sell it to you as a treatment, and we are not going to.
If a sleep problem has been going on for weeks, that is a conversation for a doctor. A sound is not a diagnosis and cannot be one.
A quiet room changes the answer
The most common complaint about brown noise is that it feels heavy, and almost every time, the room is the reason. With nothing to mask, all that low energy has no job to do, so you notice it as a presence rather than as cover.
Two fixes, both in the app. Set the distance to Far, which rolls the top off further and pushes the bed to the back of the room. Or drop the level until it is only just there. Brown noise at a level you can barely find is still doing the masking work, because the intrusion it is fighting is low too.
- Far, Near and Close change the filter, so Far sounds further away rather than simply quieter
- Maskers offer 30, 60 and 90 minutes, or all the way to your alarm
- Four layers is the cap, and brown plus one texture is usually the whole answer
Nothing repeats, because there is no file
Tock generates brown noise on your phone a sample at a time. Nothing downloads and nothing loops, so no two nights are identical and there is no seam to find.
This page does not have a web preview of it, which is a direct consequence of the same design: there is no audio file of Tock's brown noise, because it does not exist until your phone makes it. The sound ships in the app, in the Noise group, first in the list.
Who it suits, and who it does not
Worth trying if
- Traffic, trucks, a bass-heavy TV through the floor, footsteps overhead
- People who find white noise too bright but still need real cover
- Running until your alarm, because there is nothing in it to surface for
- Small rooms, where a bright noise bounces off every hard surface and a low one does not
Probably skip it if
- Quiet rooms with nothing to mask, where the low weight reads as pressure rather than comfort
- Phone speakers pushed loud to chase the bottom end, which mostly produces distortion and not much bass
- A specific high sound like a dripping tap or a whining fan, which brown noise walks straight underneath
How it behaves once it is running
- 01Tock generates it on device, sample by sample, so it never loops. Nothing to download, and no two nights sound the same.
- 02You 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.
- 03A distance control puts it Far, Near or Close, which changes how present it feels rather than just how loud it is. 42 of the 63 sounds carry it.
- 04It 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.
- RainfallThe classic pairing. Brown handles everything under a few hundred hertz, rain covers the middle, and together they need less volume than either one alone.
- OceanSurf already sits low, so the two blend into one bed rather than stacking. The waves give the rumble a slow shape without adding anything bright.
- FanA fan brings the mid and high end brown noise has none of, which turns a wall of low energy into something that sounds like a room instead of a machine.
Questions people ask
Why does brown noise feel calmer than white noise?
Mostly because of where the energy sits. Your ear is most sensitive between roughly 2 and 5 kHz, and brown noise has very little up there, so it never presses on the range that fatigues you. Some of it is association too: low, steady, distant sound is what a car, a plane cabin or far-off surf sounds like, and those are places people fall asleep easily.
Can I sleep with brown noise on every night?
Many people do. Keep the level moderate, put the phone across the room rather than next to your head, and take the occasional night off if you want to know whether you still need it. If you are setting it up for a child, or you have any hearing concern, that is a question for a clinician rather than for us.
Is brown noise better than pink noise?
Better at low-frequency cover, yes. Pink is the more balanced of the two and suits a room where the intrusion is mixed or mid-range, like a household, a corridor or wind. If you are unsure, start on pink for a couple of nights and move to brown only if a low sound is still coming through.
Does Tock have a free version I can test this in?
No, there is no free tier. Tock asks for a subscription after onboarding, with a 3-day free trial, from $39.99 a year. The full 63-sound library, layering and mixes are all included from the start rather than sold separately.
Related sounds
Nearby textures worth trying on a night this one does not land.
- White noiseWhite noise holds equal power in every one hertz band, which makes it the brightest of the sleep noises and the best at covering thin, sharp sounds: keys in a lock, a running tap, a voice through a wall. That same brightness is why plenty of people last about an hour before switching to pink or brown.
- 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.
- FanA fan makes broadband noise from air turbulence plus a very quiet periodic thump from the blades, sitting somewhere between pink and brown in balance, which is why so many people sleep to one without ever calling it white noise. Tock uses a recording of an actual fan rather than generating it, because that blade rhythm is the thing that makes it read as a fan at all.
- 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.
Elsewhere on the site
Different corner of the same problem.
- Wake timesWaking up at 7:00amBedtimes by sleep cycle for a 7:00am alarm.
- Wake tonesBeaconBeacon is a wake tone in Tock: an evenly spaced two-note pulse that your ear identifies as an alarm almost immediately. Tock's alarms are built on Apple's AlarmKit, so Beacon rings on the native full-screen alert even when the phone is on silent, sitting in a Focus, or the app hasn't been opened since last night.
- Head to headHeadspace Sleep vs PzizzIf you nap in the afternoon, or you get bored hearing the same track night after night, Pzizz. If you want to be taught how to wind down and to still be doing it in three months, Headspace Sleep.
- FeaturesAlarm on silentTock's alarms are registered with iOS through Apple's AlarmKit framework rather than played by the app in the background. That is why they ring with the ringer off, through a Focus, with Tock closed, on the native full-screen alert.
- 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 Sleep CycleSwitch to Tock if you want the alarm itself to be different: a system alarm that rings on silent and through a Focus, moved up to 30 minutes earlier into a lighter moment, with a task before it stops. Stay with Sleep Cycle if you have years of history in it, or if someone in the house is on Android.
You cannot just decide to fall asleep
Brown noise 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.