A few years ago I read something about how certain sounds help the brain settle into a working rhythm. Not silence, which can feel too sterile. Not music with lyrics, which competes for the same cognitive bandwidth you need to write or think. The sweet spot (for a lot of people) is ambient noise from a place. The specific, slightly chaotic texture of somewhere real. There are a few apps and sites that do this, and they're useful. But most of them feel like productivity tools — branded with "focus" and "deep work" language, full of options, gamified in small ways. I wanted something simpler. Something that felt less like a feature and more like opening a window. So I built Travelier. It's a small, curated collection of ambient recordings from real places. A café in Jerez where you can hear the Zumex machine turning oranges into juice at 9am. A beach somewhere in Southeast Asia. A covered market. Each place has a description that tries to capture what makes it worth listening to. There are no accounts, no shuffle buttons, no streak trackers. You find a place, you put on headphones, and you're there — or at least somewhere adjacent to there. It's a side project, built slowly and with care. I have no idea if it'll go anywhere, but it's been genuinely useful to me, and a few people I've shared it with have said the same. If that sounds like something you'd use, give it a try: travelier.app. And if you have thoughts — or a place you'd want to hear on there — I'd love to know.

Travelier

Curated ambient recordings from real places for focus

Curated ambient recordings from real places for focus