Nature sounds for sleep, now in Lullable

Why add sounds to a story app

Some nights you do not want to be told anything. A story is built to be slept through rather than finished, but it is still a voice, and a voice is still something the mind can follow. A sound with no words in it asks nothing of you at all.

So the sounds are the same idea with the voice taken out: low arousal, nothing to wait for, nothing to remember in the morning.

The ten

Field recordings

• Rain on the Jungle near Uxmal: steady rain on broad leaves in Yucatán.
• Ocean Waves at White Beach: one wave after another, unhurried.
• Beach Waves at Punta Allen: bigger surf on a far beach.
• A Small Campfire, Crackling: a low fire, logs settling.
• A Small River in the Brazilian Hills: water over stones, close and steady.
• Night Crickets at Chacahua Lagoon: a summer night with the window open.
• Night Wetland in Quintana Roo: frogs and insects calling across still water.

Noises

• White Noise: every frequency at the same level. The brightest of the three.
• Pink Noise: the edges softened, close to steady rain.
• Brown Noise: the lowest and warmest, a rumble rather than a hiss.

If white noise feels sharp, try pink, and if pink still feels bright, try brown. The three differ in how the energy is spread across low and high pitches, and which one you can forget about fastest is a matter of taste, not of rank.

Where the recordings come from

The field recordings were made by other people and shared on Freesound under open licences. Every page names the recordist and the licence. Lullable looped each one into a single seamless track, evened the level and added a slow fade at each end. The noises are generated for Lullable, with no recording in them.

How they sit with the stories

Sounds are Premium, which is $2.99 a month or $19.99 a year, and the free stories stay free. In Browse, sounds have their own chip, so they do not crowd the stories. The sleep timer works with them as it does with a story, so a track can fade to silence at fifteen, thirty, forty-five or sixty minutes.

Lullable is not a medical device and does not claim to treat anything. It is forty minutes of something quiet, ten ways.