Sleep sounds
Cricket sounds for sleep
A field after dark is one of the very few natural sounds with a real pulse in it, which splits people cleanly down the middle: half find it the most restful thing here, half lie awake counting.
In short
A 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.
- Where it starts
- 2 kHzWhere it startsAlmost nothing below that, which is why it covers sharp sounds and no rumble.
- Bundled recordings
- 22Bundled recordingsCrickets is one. The exact stagger of a real field is not something you generate.
- Distance settings
- 3Distance settingsFar is the setting most people end on with this one.
No web preview of this one
Crickets 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.
Dozens out of phase, which is the whole trick
One cricket is a metronome. Thirty crickets, each running at its own slightly different rate, average into something continuous with a faint pulse still visible inside it. That average is what people mean when they say they find crickets soothing.
It is also why this is a recording rather than a generated sound. Getting a single chirp right is easy. Getting the distribution of thirty overlapping ones right, so that it never quite settles into a pattern, is the part generators fail.
The sound is in Tock under Nature, listed as Crickets. There is no web preview of it on this page.
It is a high-end tool and only a high-end tool
Almost all the energy is above 2 kHz. That is genuinely useful against sharp, thin sounds, which are the ones people usually describe as piercing: a fridge compressor, a fan bearing, a smoke alarm chirping three doors down.
It is completely useless against anything with weight. If a bus goes past, the crickets will still be there and so will the bus. Layering with brown noise is not a refinement here, it is the fix.
The pulse is the reason it fails for some people
Tock deliberately avoids periodic sound almost everywhere. The one obvious exception in the library is a ticking clock, which is there because for the people who want it the regularity is the entire point, and it is why that sound can never be a default or a coach suggestion.
Crickets are the borderline case. The stagger hides the rhythm well enough for most people and not well enough for everyone. If you are the kind of listener who finds the beat in anything, you will know within two minutes, and no amount of volume adjustment will unfind it.
Who it suits, and who it does not
Worth trying if
- Covering thin, high intrusions: a fridge, a fan whine, a distant alarm two streets over
- Summer nights and people who sleep with the window open anyway
- Anyone who wants something clearly natural rather than clearly synthetic
Probably skip it if
- Low-frequency noise of any kind, which passes underneath crickets without touching them
- People who hear rhythm and then cannot stop hearing it, which this sound will expose immediately
- Anyone sensitive to bright, high-frequency sound over a full night
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.
- Brown noiseThe two sit at opposite ends of the spectrum and never fight. Brown handles everything low, crickets handle everything high, and together they cover more than either does alone.
- StreamWater underneath fills the middle that crickets skip entirely, and the constant motion of a brook takes the edge off the pulse.
- Night forestLeaves plus crickets is the actual composition of a real summer wood, and the rustle blurs the individual chirps into something less countable.
Questions people ask
Are crickets good for sleep or annoying?
Genuinely both, depending on the person, and there is no way to predict which you are without trying it. If you tend to notice rhythm in things, this is the sound most likely to catch you out. Setting the distance to Far softens the individual chirps more than turning the volume down does.
Will crickets mask my neighbours?
Not the parts of them you can hear. What comes through a wall is low, and crickets are entirely high. They will cover a high whine or a distant chirping alarm nicely and will do nothing at all for footsteps or a television.
Why not generate the crickets like the noise colours?
Because what makes a field sound like a field is the irregular stagger between individual insects, and that is exactly the thing a generator smooths out. Tock generates 41 of its 63 sounds and records the other 22, and the split is always along this line: textures are generated, things made of events are recorded.
Related sounds
Nearby textures worth trying on a night this one does not land.
- Night forestA 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.
- 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.
- 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 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.
- 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 youSnorersSomeone has told you that you snore, or you have woken yourself up doing it, and you have no idea how loud it really is or whether it is the kind of thing that matters.
- 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 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.
You cannot just decide to fall asleep
Crickets 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.