Rainy Night Library: Rain & Clock Sounds for Study & Focus (1 Hour, No Music) | Focus Sound Room #01

An old reading room after hours, empty and kept open just for you. One hour of rain and a wall clock — no narration, no music. In the final 40 seconds, the sound slowly fades away.

What you're hearing

You're sitting at a desk in a library at night. On the left is a rain-streaked window, with lights and a traffic signal outside. A wall clock hangs up high, bookshelves fill the right side, and a lamp glows on the desk in front of you. It's an imaginary room, not a real place.

What you hear is five sounds layered together:

• Rain on the window: a recording of rain hitting a windowpane. This is the main sound of the room.
• Distant rain: a second rain recording with the high frequencies filtered out, so it sounds farther away.
• Dripping eaves: water dripping from the edge of the roof.
• Wall clock: a tick every second, alternating between two tick sounds and landing at the exact moment the second hand moves.
• Room tone: the faint background sound of a very quiet room, recorded in a small apartment. It's what a room sounds like when nothing is playing.

The rain is stitched together from 20- to 40-second pieces taken from different points in the recordings, each overlapping the next by 3 seconds. Looping the same minute of rain over and over would let a sharp ear pick up the repeat. Overall loudness is about −20 LUFS (LUFS measures loudness the way our ears hear it), so it's mastered a little quiet on purpose.

The wall clock starts at 11:30 and its minute hand makes exactly one full turn, ending at 12:30. The pendulum swings back and forth once every 2 seconds. Here's what happens over the hour:

How to use it

• Good for: with no voices and no music, no other words get mixed in while you read, write or work through problems.
• No sudden loud sounds: there's no thunder in the hour, and the gusts build over 5 seconds. Even the midnight chime is only slightly louder than the rain.
• Breaks: if you like to work for 25 minutes and rest for 5, work from 0:00 to 25:00 and rest until 30:00. The midnight chime then marks the start of your second round. Work from 30:00 to 55:00, then take your second break. The sound starts to fade at 59:20, so you'll know the hour is up without checking the time.
• Volume: start low, about where the rain is barely audible, and turn it up slowly until it feels right. Because this one is mastered quiet, switching to something else at the same volume can sound loud.
• Mix it yourself: the "Try it" section on this page has a browser app of the same room. You can set the level of six sounds (the five above plus distant thunder) and use a timer (25 minutes by default), a 5-minute break and a note for today's goal. If the ticking bothers you, turn the clock down to zero. Distant thunder exists only in the app: raise its slider and the first far-off rumble comes within 15 to 45 seconds, then every 1 to 3 minutes after that. The app's wall clock shows the real time.

The sounds and art we used

There's no music. All the recordings come from Freesound, a site where people share sound recordings, and are released under CC0: anyone can use them freely, and no credit is required.