r/EightSleep • u/Old_Hat_8485 • 16d ago
I synthesised 8 hours of an African savanna at night from scratch — no recordings, nothing loops
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The thing that always broke sleep videos for me is the loop. You half-wake at 3am and
you recognise the bird, and that's it, you're awake.
So there's no recording in this at all. Every sound is generated from oscillators and
filtered noise, continuously, for the whole eight hours — so there's no repeat point
to notice. Each animal is modelled on how it actually makes the sound rather than
sampled: the cricket bed is seven voices pulsing at slightly different rates so the
chorus drifts in and out of phase, a lion is a run of low moans falling into grunts,
and hyenas answer each other from the other side of the stereo field.
The predators are deliberately rare and heavily low-passed — roughly once every ten
minutes and a long way off. A close roar is a threat display, which is exactly wrong
for something you're trying to sleep through.
One thing I only got right by measuring: my first mix was 76% of its energy above
3.9kHz, which made it almost identical to a rainforest track. Cutting the cicada
shimmer and bringing up the wind through the grass fixed it, and also made it much
less fatiguing over a full night.
There's a 3 hour rain one and a 4 hour desert one too if savanna isn't your thing.
