Sleep sounds
Wind sounds for sleep
Air moving past a window has no beat, no repeat and no shape you can predict. That sounds like faint praise and it is not: easy to ignore is the highest compliment a sleep sound can be paid.
In short
Wind 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.
- Wind beds in Tock
- 3Wind beds in TockGentle wind, wind through autumn trees, and a blizzard with grit in it.
- Default fade
- 30 minDefault fadeFiled as a fall-asleep aid, though nothing stops you running it longer.
- Sounds with distance
- 42Sounds with distanceFar turns wind at the glass into wind across a field.
No web preview of this one
Gentle wind 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.
Nothing to lock onto is the entire feature
Your hearing is extremely good at finding pattern. A loop, a pulse, a repeated shape, and part of your attention quietly stays on it. Wind has none of those. It drifts, and the drift itself has no period.
That is why people who cannot settle with rain or a fan often settle with wind. There is nothing in it to follow, so there is nothing to keep following.
Wind is really the object it is passing
Moving air on its own is almost silent. Everything you hear is turbulence made by an obstacle, which is why wind at a window, wind through leaves and wind across open ground are three separate sounds rather than three volumes of one.
Tock ships three of them. Gentle wind is the soft tonal one. Autumn is wind through trees, which is busier and higher. A blizzard is wind with grit in it, brighter still, and the only one of the three that masks properly.
- Gentle wind for a wind-down or as a layer under something else
- Wind through trees when you want texture rather than smoothness
- Blizzard when you actually need the cover and want it to still sound like weather
Gentle is a design choice, not a shortcoming
This bed was not built to mask. It was built to be the thing you can put underneath other things without it competing, and to be the sound for people who want the room to not be silent without the room becoming loud.
If you need real cover, layer it or pick something else. The library has 63 sounds precisely so that no one of them has to do everything.
A recording, one of twenty-two
Gentle wind is a bundled recording rather than one of the 41 generated sounds, because the slow tonal quality of real air past a real edge is harder to fake than it looks.
There is no web preview of it on this page. It is in the app under Nature, and the Far setting is worth trying first rather than last, because wind at a distance is where this sound is at its most invisible.
Who it suits, and who it does not
Worth trying if
- Wind-downs, where the job is to give your attention something formless to settle on
- People who find rain too busy and plain noise too static
- Layering under almost anything, because it adds movement without adding events
- Quiet rooms, where gentle masking is all the masking you need
Probably skip it if
- Serious noise problems, since gentle is the design brief and there is no loud version of it
- Anyone who associates wind with bad weather and finds it unsettling rather than calming
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 noiseBrown holds a steady floor and the wind drifts over it, so you get real masking with the movement wind is actually good at. This is the most useful wind layer there is.
- CricketsWind low and crickets high, occupying completely different parts of the spectrum, so neither muddies the other and the result reads as one summer night.
- Distant stormWind under distant thunder gives the storm somewhere to live between rolls, which is the storm's main weakness.
Questions people ask
Is wind good for masking noise?
Gently, and only gently. It is broadband so it covers a bit of everything, but there is not much energy in it and no low end to speak of. Put brown noise underneath if there is something real to cover, and keep the wind for the movement it adds.
Why does wind feel calmer than rain to some people?
Rain is made of thousands of tiny discrete impacts and wind is a continuous drift. If your ear is sensitive to detail, rain gives it detail to work on and wind gives it none. That is also why other people find wind featureless and prefer rain.
Can I run wind until my alarm?
Yes, though it defaults to a 30 minute fade because it is filed as a fall-asleep aid. Change the timer in the app if you want it through the night. It is steady enough that nothing in it will surface you.
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
A different corner of the same problem.
- 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 9:00amBedtimes by sleep cycle for a 9:00am alarm.
- BedtimesGoing to bed at 8:00pmWhere to put the alarm after a 8:00pm lights-out.
- Sleep by ageHow much sleep adults needThe American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends that adults sleep 7 or more hours per night on a regular basis to promote optimal health. It is expressed as a minimum rather than a range because the evidence supports a lower bound far more firmly than it supports an ideal figure.
- NapsThe coffee napA coffee nap means drinking caffeine and then immediately napping for about 20 minutes. Caffeine takes roughly 20 to 30 minutes to have a noticeable effect, so it does not stop you falling asleep quickly, and you wake as it takes hold. The two effects add rather than cancel.
- 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.
You cannot just decide to fall asleep
Gentle wind 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.