Pure Soundscapes guides
A little background sound while you cook
Try Rain or Waves alongside chopping, stirring, and waiting for dinner, while keeping the kitchen’s useful sounds easy to hear.
Set it up before your hands are busy
Choose the sound before you start handling ingredients. Rain alone is an easy experiment; Waves is another if you want a different atmosphere. Put the device somewhere dry and out of the way, and set the volume while your hands are still clean.
Keep it quiet enough to hear the things you use to cook: your kitchen timer, someone speaking, and what’s happening on the hob. The background should fit around dinner. If it makes those things harder to notice, lower it or pause.
Let the waiting parts be ordinary
While something simmers or bakes, you might prefer a little sound to reaching for another video. It can accompany washing up or setting the table without giving you another story to follow. You can also decide that the pan and the kitchen are enough on their own.
Avoid adding layers just because you have a spare minute. The kitchen already has plenty going on. If you do compare another layer, change one thing and listen while you get back to what you were doing instead of hovering over the controls.
Use the kitchen timer for the kitchen
The app’s sleep timer pauses audio; it is not a cooking alarm. Keep using the timer or alarm you normally rely on for food. Separating those two jobs avoids confusing the end of a background session with the moment dinner needs attention.
Pause when you sit down to eat if the sound no longer fits the room. If the combination was pleasant, save it in the main mixer with a plain name such as “Cooking rain.” You can start there next time without turning dinner preparation into sound design.