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How long should a baby sleep playlist be?
Short loops wake babies at the seam. Here is why we record single unbroken tracks up to eleven hours, and what to look for in any sleep video you leave running overnight.
Most baby sleep videos are short loops. Ten minutes of piano, repeated. On paper that is the same music for the same number of hours. In a dark room at two in the morning it is not the same thing at all.
The seam is the problem
Every time a loop restarts there is a seam. Even a clean one changes something: the room tone shifts, the reverb tail cuts, the first note lands slightly louder than the last one faded. An adult does not notice. A baby in light sleep often does, because the brain is listening for change rather than for music.
That is why we record our lullabies as single unbroken takes. The eleven-hour lullaby is eleven hours long. It is not a forty-minute piece played sixteen times.
What to look for in any sleep video
You do not have to use ours. These are the things worth checking in whatever you leave running:
- Length. Longer than the nap or the night you need it for. If it ends at 3am, something else fills the silence.
- No sudden changes in volume. Compression and loudness vary wildly between uploads. A track that swells in the middle will wake a sleeping baby.
- No key changes or modulation. A lift that sounds lovely in a song is a disturbance in a sleep track.
- Ads. A mid-roll at 4am undoes the whole point. Check whether the video runs ads before you rely on it.
Why ours have no ads
Our videos are marked as made for children on YouTube. One consequence of that setting is that no personalised advertising runs against them. It was not a decision we made for sleep music specifically, but it happens to be exactly right for it.
What we actually record
The lullabies are original compositions, written and recorded in-house. They are not public-domain piano arrangements, which is most of what you find when you search for baby sleep music. That matters less for whether your baby sleeps and more for whether you hear the same four bars in your head all the following day.
You can listen to all of them on the sleep music page.