We'd just had a baby and were deep in the zombie phase, the very-early-hours feeds where you desperately want sleep and your newborn hasn't quite figured out how to be alive yet. One of those nights, about 45 minutes into shushing our son, my husband Ben (@oscardog) thought: Wouldn't it be great if something could just do this?

Ben's a composer, he scores films and games. But the idea came from further back: the tape recorders he had as a kid, when he'd splice real tape into literal loops that ran round and round for hours. So he started building a shush machine that worked like a tape deck. Open it, press record, make your sound, and ten seconds later it's looping. That became Somnideck.