Sleep sounds
Forest sounds for sleep
Out in real woods at 2am the sound is far sparser than any app will admit, and that sparseness is the whole problem: a quiet scene with occasional events in it is a scene your brain will happily spend an hour cataloguing.
In short
A night forest bed is a soft, broad rustle of leaves with occasional distant events layered into it, and the design rule that makes it work is that none of those events should ever be identifiable. A sound you can name is a sound you then lie there waiting to hear again, which is the exact opposite of falling asleep.
- Recordings in the library
- 22Recordings in the libraryA forest is one, because the spacing of real events is not something you can generate.
- Sounds generated instead
- 41Sounds generated insteadAnything whose character is texture rather than events is built on your phone.
- Sounds with distance
- 42Sounds with distanceFar pushes the whole treeline back and takes the edge off the leaves.
No web preview of this one
Night forest 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.
Anything you can name is something you wait for
The far-off element in Tock's night forest is deliberately never identifiable. Not an owl, not a fox, not a branch. Give somebody a recognisable animal and they will unconsciously start predicting the next one, and predicting is a form of attention.
The same rule runs through the whole library. Calm surf with no gulls. A cafe with voices and never a word you can make out. It is the least visible design decision in the app and probably the one that matters most.
The sound is in Tock, under Nature, listed as Night forest. This page does not have a web preview of it.
Leaves are thin, and thin does not mask
Rustling leaves live mostly in the mid and upper range and carry very little energy overall. Against a quiet room that is plenty of atmosphere. Against a road it is nothing at all.
Be clear with yourself about which one you are buying. If the job is to cover a noise, this is the wrong tool and brown noise is the right one. If the job is to not be lying in silence, this does that as well as anything in the library.
A recording, because the spacing is the sound
This is one of the 22 bundled recordings. A generator can produce convincing leaf texture without much trouble. What it cannot produce is the way real events in a real wood are spaced: clustered, then nothing for a long time, then two at once.
That statistical shape is what your ear checks, and it fails a generator within a couple of minutes. The 41 generated sounds in Tock are all textures for exactly this reason, and the recordings are all things where events matter.
Who it suits, and who it does not
Worth trying if
- Quiet bedrooms where you want somewhere to be rather than something to block
- People who camp and sleep better outdoors than in, which is more common than you would think
- Layering under crickets or a stream to build a specific place instead of a generic bed
Probably skip it if
- Masking anything real, since leaves are thin and the gaps are long
- Anyone who finds unexplained distant sounds unsettling rather than peaceful
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.
- A 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.
- 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.
- CricketsThe pairing the sound was designed around. Crickets fill the high end continuously, so the leaves stop being the only thing in the room and the gaps close up.
- Gentle windWind is what moves leaves in the first place, so this is the one layer that sounds like cause and effect rather than two tracks stacked on each other.
- StreamPut water somewhere in the trees and you get a continuous element that never repeats a shape, which is exactly what the forest is short of.
Questions people ask
Is a forest sound good for insomnia?
It can be a pleasant part of a wind-down, and that is as far as anyone should go. A forest bed does not mask much and it does nothing medical. If you have been sleeping badly for weeks, that is worth raising with a doctor rather than solving with an app.
Why is there no owl or animal in it?
Because a recognisable animal is a recognisable event, and once you can identify something you start anticipating the next one. Everything in the distance here is left deliberately vague so there is nothing to track.
What should I layer with a forest?
Crickets if you want a summer night, wind if you want the leaves to feel moved rather than shuffled, a stream if you want something continuous underneath. Four layers is the cap and you can save the result as a mix.
Related sounds
Nearby textures worth trying on a night this one does not land.
- CricketsA field of crickets is not one insect but dozens slightly out of phase with each other, and that stagger is what turns a repeating chirp into a steady high shimmer you can drift on. It lives almost entirely above 2 kHz, so it covers thin, sharp sounds well and does nothing whatsoever about traffic.
- StreamA small stream is mostly mid and high frequency water noise with very little below a couple of hundred hertz, so it sounds alive and close but has almost nothing to fight a passing truck with. It suits a quiet bedroom where you want an alternative to silence, not a room you are trying to defend.
- Gentle windWind is broadband noise shaped by whatever it is moving past, drifting slowly up and down in level with no rhythm your ear can lock onto, which makes it unusually easy to stop noticing. It masks gently rather than firmly, so it belongs in a wind-down more than it belongs in a fight with a busy street.
- RainfallSteady rainfall spreads its energy fairly evenly across the audible range, close enough to pink noise that it masks about as well while sounding a great deal less like a machine. The bigger variable is the surface: rain on canvas, on glass and on a car roof are three genuinely different sounds, and only one of them will suit your room.
Elsewhere on the site
A different corner of the same problem.
- FeaturesSleep scoreThe sleep score is a single number for a night, sitting at the top of that night detail view. Underneath it are the parts that produced it, and across nights the insights cover 21 metrics in 7 groups plus long-run measures like sleep regularity and sleep debt.
- Tock for youNight shift workersYou finish at 7am and try to sleep while the sun is up, the neighbours are drilling and your phone is on silent so nothing wakes you. Then you have to get up on time anyway, in the middle of what your body still thinks is the afternoon.
- AlternativesTock vs Apple Health SleepIf you wear an Apple Watch and you only want to see how long you slept, Apple Health already does it for free and does it better than any phone estimate. Tock adds the room: sound, snoring, a score, an alarm that can move earlier, and a coach that can explain what it found.
- RoundupsThe best smart alarm apps, and what smart should meanTock is the best smart alarm app on iPhone. It watches the 30 minutes before your alarm using two signals, movement and sound, rings early if it catches a lighter moment, and falls back to your set time no matter what. Sleep Cycle is the long-established alternative, and Pillow is the better pick if you already wear an Apple Watch to bed.
- Wake timesWaking up at 6:30amBedtimes by sleep cycle for a 6:30am alarm.
- BedtimesGoing to bed at 1:30amWhere to put the alarm after a 1:30am lights-out.
You cannot just decide to fall asleep
Night forest 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.