Listen

Here you can listen to the sounds this app uses.

Use earphones, or the iPhone’s own speaker, at about the volume you would have while falling asleep.

The morning sound

At the time you set, the sound of the forest begins, so quiet you can hardly hear it. Over about 15 minutes it grows, little by little. At the end, the clear voice of the Japanese bush warbler (uguisu) sings.

A graph with 0 to 15 minutes across the bottom and loudness up the side. It rises slowly to 7% by 3.5 minutes, stays at 7% until 9.5 minutes, then rises to 100% at 15 minutes. After that the forest goes quiet and the warbler sings at 100% — How loud the morning forest is (for a 15-minute setting). It has three parts: the slow rise, the quiet stretch, and the way up to waking.

Fifteen morning minutes, heard in one minute and seventeen seconds

A sample that squeezes the real 15 minutes into 1 minute 17 seconds.

The last 3 seconds of each of the 15 minutes were cut out and joined together (15 places).
Each of those 3-second pieces is at exactly the loudness of the real thing at that moment. The first 20 seconds or so sound very quiet. That is what it is really like.
After that, just as in the real thing, the forest fades out over 7 seconds, there are 3 seconds of silence, and the warbler sings (cut here at 22 seconds).

Note: the speed and the pitch have not been changed. The pieces were cut, joined, and given the same loudness as the real thing — nothing else.

The warbler

Two warbler recordings are used, and one of them sings each morning.

The longer one (3 minutes)

The shorter one (1 minute 30 seconds)

The sleep sounds

These play when you tap “Good night”. You can choose one of three. They begin very quietly, and once the time you set has passed they grow quieter still, little by little.

Midnight forest

Rainy night

Bell crickets

Note: each sample here is 30 seconds (taken from the middle of a sound about 15 minutes long, with 2 seconds of smoothing at each end). In the app, the same sound repeats.

Note: in the app the sleep sounds play very quietly (0.1–5%). These samples are at the loudness of the original files, so that they are easy to hear here.