How it works

A song written while you sleep

Four minutes of your evening, none of your morning. Here is the whole of it, in order.

The AlarmSong alarm screen with a countdown reading three days fifteen hours, a 07:00 alarm card, the days of the week and the title of the song waiting

Step one · the evening

You set an alarm

A time and the days it repeats. That part is an ordinary alarm clock, and it behaves like one — it is the real system alarm, so it rings through a locked screen and a closed app.

Underneath it the app tells you the one thing an alarm clock never does: what it is going to sing about tomorrow, and what the song is called.

A screen asking what your day is like, showing that the calendar is connected with three things on that morning, and a field to describe the day in your own words

Step two · the evening

You say what the day looks like

Let it read tomorrow from your calendar and it takes the titles and the times — the dentist at ten, the call at half past one. We read them for that one morning and we do not keep them.

No calendar, or a day that is not in one? Type it: flight at six, mum’s birthday, still no invoice. The song takes it from there.

A style picker with a search field over a hundred styles, showing indie pop selected among synth-pop, bedroom pop, hip-hop, shoegaze and math rock

Step three · the evening

You pick the music

A hundred styles with a search box, from indie pop through boom bap to math rock. Pick a few and it will move between them, so Tuesday does not sound like Monday.

Nothing in the list fits? Describe it in your own words and it writes to that instead.

A screen headed Writing your song, with the line looping a lazy jazz chord, a progress bar, about two minutes left, and a note saying you can close the app

Step four · the night

The song gets written

A minute or two, and you can close the app while it happens — the writing is not on your phone, so your battery is not paying for it.

Words first, then music, then a finished track that sits on the phone waiting for the morning. Nobody has heard it before, and nobody will hear it again.

A list of past songs with titles like The Dentist Can Wait and Leg Day, Allegedly, their lengths, and hearts marking the ones kept forever

Step five · the morning

It wakes you, and then it stays

At your time the song plays as the alarm — the whole song, not thirty seconds of it, from the lock screen, with the phone face down on the other side of the room if that is where you keep it.

Afterwards it goes into the list. Songs are kept for a week; heart one and it stays for good.

And when things go wrong

They will. Here is what happens then.

No song by the morning

The alarm still rings — with a fallback sound, not with silence. An alarm that stays quiet because a server had a bad night is not an alarm.
No internet in the evening

The alarm sets anyway and the app keeps trying. Writing needs a connection; ringing does not.
No calendar

Then the song is about the morning itself rather than your day. It works, it is just less pointed.

That is the whole thing

Nothing to solve, nothing to shake, no maths at seven in the morning. Just curiosity about what it made of today.

What else it does What it will cost