White noise vs pink noise vs brown noise
Three colors of noise, one at a time. Press a button to play it - starts quiet, fades in, and never plays until you ask it to.
Nothing playing
Prefer it to fade out on its own?
The app does this with a 10-hour timer and no screen. iPhone, iPad, Apple TV.
What's the difference between white, pink, and brown noise
All three are random noise with a different balance of frequencies. White noise has equal energy at every frequency - it's the flattest, brightest-sounding of the three. Pink noise drops in energy as frequency rises, roughly 3dB per octave, so it sounds duller and more balanced to the ear. Brown noise (also called red noise) drops off faster still, closer to 6dB per octave, and sounds like a low rumble - closer to a waterfall than a hiss.
Does noise actually help you sleep?
The evidence is mixed, and some of it points the other way. A 2026 study in the journal Sleep, reported by Penn Medicine, found that continuous pink noise played at 50 decibels all night cut REM sleep by about 19 minutes compared to a silent night, and left participants reporting worse sleep quality. Other research, summarized by the Sleep Foundation, has found pink noise helping some people fall asleep faster - though without published sample sizes, that's weaker evidence than the REM study above. Brown noise has even less research behind it than pink; most claims about it are personal reports, not published studies.
One difference worth naming plainly: the study above tested continuous noise playing all night. Room for Stars' own Sleep Timer fades sound out once you're asleep instead of running until morning - a different exposure pattern than what was studied, not a claim that it avoids the same effect.