Generated. Live. Offline.

What Sonen is

Sonen makes sound on your device, while you listen. It is not a library of recordings and it is not a playlist. There is an engine, a few hundred kilobytes of it, and it builds the music in the moment from how you say you feel and what time of day it is.

That is the whole product, and everything below follows from it.

It never plays the same thing twice

Because nothing is a recording, nothing repeats. There is no loop point to learn and no seam to notice on the ninth listen. The sound you had on Tuesday is gone, and the one you have now is being made as you hear it.

This is also why a session can be any length. Twenty minutes and eight hours are the same to an engine that is generating rather than playing.

Nothing is streamed

Turn on aeroplane mode and Sonen keeps playing. Nothing is fetched while you listen, because there is nothing to fetch — the engine is already on your device, and it is making the sound there.

There is an environmental point in that, and it is worth stating carefully rather than loudly. Streaming audio moves data from a data centre to you every time somebody presses play. Sonen does not, so that cost is not paid. Your device still uses power, and we are not going to pretend otherwise or call this green. It is simply one thing that is not happening.

A binaural beat in every mode

Under every mode there are two tones, one in each ear, a few hertz apart, and you hear a slow beat at the difference: 2.5 Hz in Rest, up to 16 Hz in Move. They are made live like everything else, at exact frequencies, for as long as you listen, rather than looped from a file.

We tell you the rate and the name of the band it falls in. We do not tell you what it will do to you, for the reason given further down. How Sonen makes them.

Turn the connection off

Sonen was built to work with nothing connected. Turn on aeroplane mode and it keeps playing — every mode, every soundscape, the pad, the breath pacer and the pictures. You can check that in ten seconds, and we would rather you did than took our word for it.

That makes it useful wherever the connection is gone anyway: a long flight, a train through the hills, a cabin at the end of a track. And in the one place people switch it off on purpose. Plenty of people turn the wifi off at the router every night, and Sonen is still there when they do.

A membership does not lapse because the signal did. Your device remembers that you are a member until the date your membership runs to, so a night with the wifi off is the same as any other night.

Being offline also means being left alone. Sonen sends no notifications with a connection or without one, so nothing is waiting for you when you come back. The only thing it asks of your phone is to keep playing.

The same is true of Gentle Wake and the sleep timer. Once you have signed in, your device keeps what they need for as long as your membership runs, so the night you turn the router off is a night they still work.

There is no feed

No notifications. No streaks. No daily reminder to come back, no badge for listening seven days running, and no number that goes up.

Those things exist to bring you back whether or not returning is good for you, and a product about settling has no business using them. If Sonen is useful you will open it. If it stops being useful we would rather you stopped opening it than felt nagged into it.

The honest measure of a session here is that you forgot the app was running.

We make no claims about your health

Sonen is not a treatment and we will not describe it as one. No clinical language, no studies we did not run, no promises about sleep, focus or anxiety.

What we will say is how it is built — brown noise under a low drone, a 2.5 Hz binaural beat between the ears, a pad that arrives every few seconds and then does not — and let you decide whether it suits you. The free tier exists so that decision costs nothing.

It is one person and an engine

Sonen is made by one person. It is not a start-up spending someone else's money to buy an audience, and there is no plan that requires it to become one.

That shapes the product in ways you can see. Membership pays for the work, so the work is answerable to members rather than to advertisers. There is no investor who needs the numbers to look a particular way by December. When something is not ready it stays unreleased, because nobody is waiting on a quarter.

What is free, and what is not

Every mode is free. Every soundscape is free. The pad that shapes the sound, the breath pacer, the pictures — all free, and they stay that way.

What membership buys is length, and the things that only make sense at length: sessions that do not stop after twenty minutes, a sunrise made of sound, a timer that thins out rather than ending. The free tier is not a demo with the good parts removed. It is the whole instrument, for a shorter time.

We keep almost nothing

No analytics. No tracking pixels. No advertising identifiers. An email address if you have an account, because that is how you sign in, and a note of whether your membership is current. That is close to all of it, and the privacy page lists the rest.

There is no password, because a password is one more thing that can be stolen from us.

Nothing on the page comes from anywhere else either — not the pictures, not the engine, not even the typeface, which we moved onto our own server so that opening Sonen tells nobody but us that you did.

Where this goes

The engine gets better: more mechanisms that make a mode feel like itself, more that the sound can do at length. The app gets to the places a browser cannot reach — a real alarm, a session with the screen off.

What will not change is the part at the top. The sound is made where you are, while you listen, and it belongs to that moment rather than to a catalogue.

Written 20 September 2026