A free tool from Sophie's Bureau
Sound for the work in front of you.
Pick a session for the kind of work you're about to do. Most open with a few minutes of settling, because the research favours listening before you start as well as during. Then a steady tone sits underneath the work until it's done.
Headphones give you binaural beats, a slightly different tone in each ear.
Speakers switch to pulsed tones, which work without headphones.
No account, no tracking of your sessions. Keep the volume low enough to forget about.
Focus timer
Work in rounds, rest between them.
A soft chime marks each change, so you can stop watching the clock. Short breaks restore energy better than they raise output, so take them away from the screen.
Office mode
For speakers and shared rooms.
No tones at all, only noise and recorded natural sound. It masks chatter, evens out a room and plays properly through laptop speakers, so it suits open-plan days, co-working desks and the hour before a call.
Your log
Hours you protected.
Every session, timer round and office stretch over a minute long is logged here. A day counts towards your streak once it reaches ten minutes.
Last fourteen days
Recent
The evidence
What the research supports, and where it runs out.
Focus-sound apps tend to promise more than the studies behind them. Deep Hours uses only what the research supports, says so where the evidence is thin, and makes no claims about healing frequencies. Here is what each part rests on.
| Setting | Used in | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Beta 16 Hz | Deep work, Admin block, Timer | ●●●○ One controlled study on vigilance and mood |
| Alpha 10 Hz | Most lead-ins, Writing | ●●○○ Covered by the meta-analysis, mixed on its own |
| Pink and white noise | Office mode, Timer | ●●●○ Small benefit for attention difficulties |
| Short breaks | Timer | ●●●○ Better energy, little change in output |
| 40 Hz gamma | Hard problem | ●○○○ Thin. Treat it as an experiment |
Binaural beats
A 2019 meta-analysis pooled 22 studies and found a medium effect of binaural beats on cognition and anxiety, and on how much pain people reported. Two of its details shaped this app. Listening before a task, or before and during it, did better than listening only during it, which is why most sessions open with a settling stretch. Longer exposure also helped, so the sessions run for real working lengths instead of five-minute samples.
Whether the beats pull your brainwaves into step is a separate question, and the answer is unclear. A 2023 systematic review of 14 EEG studies found five that supported entrainment, eight that contradicted it and one with mixed results. The effects people report may come from somewhere other than entrainment, so Deep Hours never claims your brain locks on to the number on the screen.
The beats may help. The explanation usually given for why they help is the part with the weakest evidence.
Why beta for focus
The clearest single result comes from a 1998 study in which 29 people did a 30-minute vigilance task three times, listening to pink noise with beats mixed in. With beta beats at 16 and 24 Hz they caught more targets, raised fewer false alarms and reported less negative mood than with theta and delta beats. The focus stretches in Deep work and Admin block use 16 Hz with a noise bed for that reason. It is one study with a small sample, and the app is built so you can switch to plain noise if the tones don't suit you.
Noise on its own
A 2024 meta-analysis of 13 studies found that white and pink noise gave a small benefit on tasks for people with ADHD or attention difficulties, and a small cost for everyone else. Brown noise wasn't tested. Office mode exists because noise plays well through speakers and masks a shared room, and because some people find it helps. If it doesn't help you, the studies suggest silence may be the better choice.
Breaks
A 2022 meta-analysis of 22 studies found that breaks of ten minutes or less raised vigour and reduced fatigue, without reliably improving performance. Longer breaks helped performance more on creative and clerical work than on demanding analytical tasks. No study supports one perfect interval, so the timer offers 25/5, 50/10 and 90/20 and lets you set your own.
Sources
- Garcia-Argibay, M., Santed, M. A. and Reales, J. M. (2019). Efficacy of binaural auditory beats in cognition, anxiety, and pain perception: a meta-analysis. Psychological Research, 83(2), 357–372. PubMed
- Ingendoh, R. M., Posny, E. S. and Heine, A. (2023). Binaural beats to entrain the brain? A systematic review of the effects of binaural beat stimulation on brain oscillatory activity. PLOS ONE, 18(5). PMC
- Lane, J. D., Kasian, S. J., Owens, J. E. and Marsh, G. R. (1998). Binaural auditory beats affect vigilance performance and mood. Physiology & Behavior, 63(2), 249–252. PubMed
- Nigg, J. T., Bruton, A., Kozlowski, M. B., Johnstone, J. M. and Karalunas, S. L. (2024). Systematic review and meta-analysis: do white noise or pink noise help with task performance in youth with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder or with elevated attention problems? Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry. PMC
- Albulescu, P., Macsinga, I., Rusu, A., Sulea, C., Bodnaru, A. and Tulbure, B. T. (2022). "Give me a break!" A systematic review and meta-analysis on the efficacy of micro-breaks for increasing well-being and performance. PLOS ONE, 17(8). PMC