Born at 3 AM: What would you want this tool to do?
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.
It quietly grew into a real instrument underneath: trim the loop on a waveform, bend the pitch, run it backwards, strip the room noise out on-device, drop it into a studio reverb. Plus a Noise Mode with original field recordings and a 45-minute piece he composed.
I've been his tester at every bedtime. We go live here tomorrow (Thursday). Before we do, I'd love to know:
What would you want a tool like this to do?
(Follow the page if you'd like to see it at launch.)
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One part I'd like to add, since it's something I'm proudest of: none of the Noise Mode sounds are stock. The environmental field recordings were all captured on location, which in at least one case meant hauling gear into a rainforest at night that turned out to be about 80% mosquito.
And Nocturne, the 45-minute piece I wrote when our daughter was a newborn, mostly to keep myself sane. Turns out sleep deprivation is a strange kind of muse.