White noise for sleeping.

White noise is the sleep sound everyone has heard of, and the reason it works is simpler than the name: it's even. Nothing in it starts or stops, rises or arrives. Your hearing has no events to report, so it stops reporting, and a brain with nothing new to report has one direction left to go.

Pure white noise has one flaw in a real bedroom — the very top edge of its hiss can read as sharp, like a fan running a touch too fast. The noise family solves this by moving the weight lower: pink noise folds the top down, brown noise goes deeper still, until the sound sits behind the room instead of on top of it.

Soft noise is that solution: the same even, uneventful idea white noise is named for, tuned warmer with more low end than hiss. It's a kinder cut of the same steady sound — one you stop noticing within a minute, which is the property that matters. A sleep noise that needs attention isn't doing its job.

Play it quieter than you think it needs to be. Dark room, cool air, the phone charging away from the bed. Press play, close your eyes, and let the evenness of it stand in for the night — it will not change, and that is precisely what you don't need to think about.

It's playing above, one tap away. Even and low, until you stop noticing it entirely.