Sleep sounds
Rain sounds for sleep
There's a reason this is the most requested sleep sound on every app that ships one. Broad enough to cover real noise, irregular enough that your ear eventually stops tracking it, and familiar enough that nobody has to be talked into it.
Steady 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.
- Rain beds in Tock
- 4Rain beds in TockOpen rain, a tent roof a foot above your head, a window, and a car roof.
- Bundled recordings
- 22Bundled recordingsUsed only where a real recording beats anything a phone can synthesise.
- Distance steps
- 3Distance stepsFar, Near and Close, available on 42 of the 63 sounds.
Rain is not one sound, the surface is
A drop by itself is almost nothing. What you hear is the impact, and the impact is entirely about what it lands on. Canvas a foot over your head is a broad, close patter. Glass is a handful of separate taps you could count. A car roof turns hundreds of random impacts into one pitched sheet, which masks harder than open rain and is why people fall asleep in parked cars.
Tock ships four of them for that reason rather than one generic rain with a volume slider: open rainfall, rain on a tent, rain on the window, and rain on the car. Picking the surface is the real choice here.
- Open rainfall for general cover, the broadest of the four
- Rain on a tent when you want it close and enclosing
- Rain on the window if you like being able to hear individual drops
- Rain on the car when you need the hardest masking rain can give you
Broad and irregular is a useful combination
Rain covers a wide band, so it masks a lot of different intrusions at once instead of specialising. And because the pattern never repeats at any scale you can hold in your head, your ear gives up on it faster than it gives up on a perfectly steady tone.
That giving-up is the point. A sound you have stopped tracking is a sound that can no longer wake you, and irregularity gets you there quicker than smoothness does.
A recording, because nothing synthesises real rain
Rain is one of the 22 recordings Tock bundles rather than one of the 41 sounds it generates. Synthesised rain always ends up sounding like filtered noise with clicks in it, and the ear catches that immediately.
The trade is honest: a recording loops. Tock smooths the seam so the wrap is not obvious, but a loop is still a loop, and if you are the kind of person who goes hunting for the repeat at 3am you will eventually find it. That is exactly who the generated sounds are there for.
If loops bother you, layer rain with brown noise. The generated layer never repeats, and it covers the seam in the one that does.
Distance is a filter, not a volume knob
Far, Near and Close do what real distance does to sound: they take the high frequencies off first, because air and objects absorb the top end long before they touch the bottom. Set rain to Far and it genuinely sounds like it is happening further away rather than just more quietly.
It is on 42 of the 63 sounds, everything in the Noise, Nature and Rooms groups. The music beds are excluded on purpose, because moving a piano further away is a reverb and a simple filter just sounds like somebody put a blanket over it.
Who it suits, and who it does not
Worth trying if
- Almost any room, since rain covers a wide range without leaning bright or heavy
- People who bounce off plain noise and want something with a bit of life in it
- Running all night, because nothing in steady rain is an event
- Layering under something sparser, like a distant storm or a fire, to give it a floor
Probably skip it if
- Heavy traffic on its own, where rain runs out of low end and brown noise does not
- Anyone who finds water sounds make them get up in the night, which is a real and common complaint
How it behaves once it is running
- 01It is one of the 22 bundled recordings, so it plays from the app with nothing to fetch.
- 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.
- Brown noiseThe pairing most people end on. Brown takes everything under a few hundred hertz, rain handles the rest, and neither one has to be loud.
- Distant stormDistant thunder on its own is thin and full of gaps. Over rain it becomes the storm you actually pictured, and the rain fills the silences the thunder leaves.
- FireplaceRain outside, fire inside. The rain gives the crackles a floor to sit on, which softens the transients that would otherwise be the sharpest thing in the room.
Questions people ask
Which rain sound is best for sleep?
Start with open rainfall, since it is the broadest and the least distinctive. Move to rain on the car if something is still coming through, because the roof concentrates the sound into a harder sheet. Move to rain on the window if you find the others too much like static and you want to hear individual drops.
Do rain sounds actually help you sleep?
They mask, which is measurable and real: a steady bed of sound makes a sudden noise a smaller event and a smaller event is less likely to surface you. Whether rain specifically relaxes you beyond that is personal, and the research on any one sound is thin. Most people who love it love it for both reasons and cannot separate them.
Does the rain sound loop?
Yes, this one does. It is a recording, and Tock smooths the seam before it ever wraps. If a loop is a dealbreaker, the 41 generated sounds never repeat, and layering one under the rain works well.
Can I mix rain with other sounds?
Up to four at a time, and you can save the stack as a mix and reopen it any night. Rain plus brown noise is the most common combination, with a distant storm as a third layer when you want weather rather than cover.
Related sounds
Nearby textures worth trying on a night this one does not land.
- Distant stormFar-off thunder helps at the start of the night because the slow rolling swells give your attention something easy to follow while it lets go, and it hurts later because every roll is a change in level, which is exactly what surfaces a light sleeper. Tock treats it as a fall-asleep aid and fades it out after half an hour by default.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Elsewhere on the site
Different corner of the same problem.
- 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 apps for studentsFor most students the best answer is free: the iPhone Clock app, a wake time you keep at weekends, and Alarmy's free tier if you sleep through things. Tock is the paid pick worth the money once you have tried that and still miss 9am lectures.
- Wake timesWaking up at 8:30amBedtimes by sleep cycle for a 8:30am alarm.
- Wake tonesMusic boxMusic box is Tock's slowest and most nostalgic wake tone, a thin bell-like melody that unwinds instead of alerting. It rings reliably through silent mode because Tock's alarms run on Apple's AlarmKit, but as a tone it is the weakest choice in the set for anyone who genuinely sleeps hard.
- Head to headAlarmy vs Sleep as AndroidOn an iPhone this is over before it starts: Sleep as Android is Android only, so Alarmy is your only option of the two. On Android, take Sleep as Android if you want depth, and Alarmy if you only want the alarm to be harder to beat.
- FeaturesWake-up missionsA wake-up mission is a small task that has to be completed before the alarm will stop. Tock ships 9 of them in 3 families: mind, body and place. The alarm keeps ringing the whole time the task is on screen.
You cannot just decide to fall asleep
Rainfall 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.