Sleep sounds
Ocean wave sounds for sleep
Surf does something none of the noise colours can: it moves on a timescale you feel rather than hear. That single quality is either exactly why you love it or exactly why it keeps you awake.
In short
Rolling 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.
- Rough swell cycle
- 10 sRough swell cycleSlower than a breath, which is part of why people pace themselves to it.
- Water beds in Tock
- 7Water beds in TockOcean, stream, waterfall, underwater, harbour, a sailboat cabin and pond frogs.
- Sounds with distance
- 42Sounds with distanceFar moves the surf up the beach without simply turning it down.
A cycle you can feel is rarer than it sounds
Almost everything else in a sleep library is either perfectly steady or randomly irregular. Surf is neither. It has a real period, roughly ten seconds from crest to crest, which is slow enough that you experience it as movement rather than as rhythm.
Some people breathe with it without deciding to. That is not a claimed feature and nobody should promise it, but it is the most common thing people say about this sound, and it is worth knowing before you pick it.
The trough is where the masking leaks
At the top of a wave you have plenty of broadband cover. At the bottom you have noticeably less, and whatever you were masking gets its chance. Over a night that is a lot of chances.
This is not a flaw in the recording, it is what surf is. If the room is quiet it will never matter. If you are covering a street, put something flat underneath and let the waves ride on top of it.
It is a recording, and it is a short one
Ocean is one of the 22 bundled recordings rather than one of the 41 generated sounds. A wave has a shape that a synthesiser can approximate and never quite get, and the approximations always end up sounding like noise with a slow filter sweep on it.
Because the swell has a period, the loop point is more findable here than on rain. Layering a generated sound underneath is the standard fix and it works well.
Calm surf, deliberately, and nothing else in it
No gulls, no wind, no voices further up the beach. Every one of those is a nameable event, and a nameable event is something you catalogue and then wait for again.
The same rule runs through the whole library. The night forest has something far off in it that is deliberately never identifiable. The cafe has voices in it and never a word you can make out. Once you can name a sound, you are listening to it rather than sleeping through it.
Who it suits, and who it does not
Worth trying if
- People who find steady noise sterile and want something that moves
- Winding down, where the slow cycle gives your breathing something to follow
- Rooms that are already fairly quiet, so the gaps in the cycle do not matter
- Layering under a low bed, which fills the troughs and keeps the masking honest
Probably skip it if
- A noisy street, because at the bottom of every cycle the cover thins out and the street comes back
- Anyone the sound of water sends to the bathroom, which is a genuine reason people abandon it
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 noiseThis is the fix for the one real weakness. Brown noise fills the trough of every wave, so the masking holds steady while the surf keeps its shape on top.
- Gentle windWind drifting over the swell makes it read as a coastline rather than a loop of water, and it adds nothing sharp while doing it.
- CricketsA warm-night coast. The crickets sit almost entirely above 2 kHz and the surf sits below, so they occupy different ground and never turn to mush.
Questions people ask
Are ocean sounds good for sleep?
They work well for falling asleep and slightly less well for staying asleep, because the level rises and falls instead of holding still. If your room is quiet, that difference will never show up. If you are trying to cover something constant, put a flat bed underneath.
Why does Tock call it Ocean rather than waves?
The names describe the place rather than the effect, which is a house rule that runs through the whole library. The internal id is tide, which is why the preview file on this page is named that way, but in the app it is listed as Ocean under Nature.
Ocean or rain for masking?
Rain, comfortably. Rain holds a near-constant level, so the cover never thins out, and it spreads across a similar range. Choose ocean when you want the movement and either do not need heavy masking or are willing to layer something under it.
Related sounds
Nearby textures worth trying on a night this one does not land.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Elsewhere on the site
A different corner of the same problem.
- Wake tonesCustom alarm soundTock comes with 18 wake tones, and if none of them suit you it takes your own audio as the alarm instead. Whatever you choose still gets scheduled through Apple's AlarmKit, so the silent switch, an active Focus and a fully closed app have no bearing on whether it rings.
- Head to headAutoSleep vs RiseAutoSleep is for the Apple Watch owner who wants the night in detail. Rise is for the person who has seen enough charts and wants to know why the afternoon keeps falling apart.
- FeaturesWidgetsTock puts tonight outside the app: 3 Home Screen widgets, Lock Screen and StandBy accessories, 3 Control Center tiles, 8 Live Activities, Siri App Shortcuts, 4 quick actions on the icon and a Focus filter.
- Tock for youTravellers with jet lagYou landed, you are on local time on paper, and your body is running four or eight hours behind. Wide awake at 3am, unusable at 3pm, and it lasts roughly a day per time zone.
- AlternativesTock vs Headspace SleepHeadspace Sleep is the better choice if you want a voice walking you through a wind-down inside a proper course structure. Tock is the choice if you want the night measured from the phone and an alarm that moves into a lighter moment. Neither one covers the other.
- RoundupsThe best sleep apps for iPhone, sorted by what you're fixingFor iPhone, the best sleep app depends on the problem. Tock is the best all-round pick when the alarm and the morning are what is broken, Apple Health Sleep is the free place to start, Calm is for people who cannot fall asleep, AutoSleep is for Apple Watch owners, Rise is for sleep debt and SnoreLab is for snoring.
You cannot just decide to fall asleep
Ocean 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.