Spanning medical and popular sleep science (see Walker, 2017), through to self-help literature and popular news coverage (see Boden, et al., 2008 Williams, et al., 2010), disturbed sleep is viewed as an epidemic. It appears that sleep, or lack of it, has reached a point of crisis in contemporary culture. In doing so, we argue that these functions draw on histories or genealogies of both acoustic media and sleep science in attempts to optimise the practices and rhythms associated with sleeping bodies. We show how these features operate to organise transitions between waking and sleeping states. This occurs through two key common acoustic features within sleep apps - ‘smart wake up’ alarms and ‘brainwave entrainment’ sound frequencies. However, the analysis also reveals how sleep apps go beyond simply monitoring sleep patterns by directly intervening in and mediating sleep-wake rhythms (see Hassoun and Gilmore, 2017). We show how sleep apps remediate the monitoring technologies of the sleep science lab to make claims of accuracy and efficacy. We analyse how their functions implicate sleeping bodies within new patterns of management and optimisation. Drawing on an analysis of the features in the most popular sleep apps in the Apple App store, this paper investigates the dominant types of sleep apps available for everyday use. This paper contributes to this research by analysing how sleeping practices are monitored and configured through sleep-related mobile Internet applications.

As such, there is a growing need to examine and understand how sleep technologies mediate practices of sleep as part of the wider digital monitoring, communication, and management of personal health and well-being. Yet, in another sense, this gap is surprising, given the increasing critical attention within media studies on political implications of digital technologies for intervening in biological rhythms ( e.g., Lupton, 2016). In one sense, this is not unexpected, given sleep’s detachment from the everyday social interaction that defines media studies research.

However, it has yet to be the subject of sustained critical analysis within Internet, media, or communications studies ( cf., Fuller, 2018). The how, where, and when of our sleep has been studied from a range of anthropological, sociological, and historical perspectives (see Hsu, 2017). How, where, and when we sleep also depends on the type of society in which we live”. is more than a shared biological universal. These studies are resituating and complicating the traditional locus of sleep research within science and medicine. These sleep-specific media are underpinned by the spread and normalisation of wider Internet economies and cultural practices of self-tracking and datafication - the transformation of daily life into digital information.Īlongside personal practices of sleep tracking there is a growing scholarly interest in the socio-cultural and political implications of mediating sleep. Sleep is increasingly a targeted site of daily monitoring via Internet technologies, including mobile and wearable devices, Internet of Things-enabled products for the bedroom, and personal data collection and visualisation. Smart wake up: Optimising the rhythms of sleepīinaural beats: Modulating the frequency of sleep Science in the attempt to optimise the practices and rhythms associated with sleeping bodies. In doing so, we argue that these functions draw on histories or genealogies of both acoustic media and sleep This occurs through two key acoustic features common within sleep apps - ‘smart wake up’ alarms and ‘brainwave entrainment’ sound frequencies. However, the analysis also reveals how sleep apps go beyond simply monitoring sleep patterns by directly intervening in and mediating sleep-wake rhythms. This article contributes to the critical analysis of sleep and its technological mediation by analysing how sleep is modulated through mobile applications. Sleep mode: Mobile apps and the optimisation of sleep-wake rhythms

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