You would expect a company selling sleep sounds to answer this with a triumphant yes. Here is the truthful version instead, and it costs us something to write it.
What the studies actually show
Reviews of the literature — including a widely cited 2021 systematic review in Sleep Medicine Reviews — land in roughly the same place: the studies are small, the methods vary enormously, the results point in different directions, and some flag possible costs to sleep depth rather than benefits.
A few controlled studies find people in loud urban bedrooms falling asleep faster with steady noise; hospital and infant-care settings show masking value. None of it supports "scientifically proven deeper sleep" as a general claim. If a sales page tells you otherwise, it is quoting press releases rather than papers.
Where sound clearly earns its keep
The unglamorous mechanism is the reliable one. What wakes you at night is rarely steady loudness — it is change: the door, the siren, the neighbour's shower hitting a silent room at two in the morning. Steady sound raises the floor, so those events arrive as small changes rather than as alarms.
If you sleep next to thin walls, a snoring partner, or a city street, or you work shifts and sleep against the daylight, masking is not a placebo. It is acoustics, and it is the entire claim we make.
The caveats an honest app owes you
- Volume: masking works at modest levels, under the loudness of a quiet conversation. All night at high volume helps nothing and is not kind to your hearing.
- Dependency: if you always sleep with sound, silent hotel rooms get harder. Mostly harmless — and a good argument for sound that lives on your phone rather than on a stream that dies with the wi-fi.
- Infants: cot and nursery guidance is its own subject with its own rules. Keep any sound source well away from the crib and conservative in volume, and take that advice from a paediatrician. Hush is written for adults.
- Chronic insomnia: the first-line treatment is CBT-I with a clinician. Sound is cover and comfort, not a cure, and anyone selling it as treatment is overreaching.
So should you try it?
If noise, or a mind that will not idle in a silent room, is part of your problem — yes. It is cheap, low-risk and reversible. Try it properly: the same sound, a modest volume, two weeks, and judge by your mornings rather than by first impressions. Darker textures are easier to live under all night than bright hiss.
And if it does nothing for you, that is a real result too. You are out one experiment rather than a subscription.
Why Hush is built the way it is
Everything the evidence actually supports — steady, seamless, modest-volume sound, available every night, offline, identical — needs no catalogue and no server. So we did not build one. Every sound is synthesized on the device as it plays: no audio files, no streaming, nothing to fetch.
That is why the price is one payment of $19.99 — no sound packs to buy. There is no ongoing cost behind the product to recover, so there is no honest reason to bill you every year for it, and no ads interrupting a sleep app, which should be obvious.