Guide

By Filip Kowalski · Published September 14, 2026

How to sleep with a snoring partner: the setting that covers a snore

Slo plays the sound that masks a snoring partner, free in a browser tab at slonoise.com and on iPhone, Android and Mac, with per-layer volume and a timer: brown or pink noise rather than white, because most snoring energy sits low, running continuously all night at a level just above the quietest snores. Wear earplugs under it for the loud peaks that noise alone will not cover, and take habitual loud snoring with gasping, choking or pauses in breathing to a GP, because the NHS says those point to sleep apnoea.

Why a snore is a different problem from a quiet room

Most sleep-sound advice assumes a silent bedroom and a busy head. The sound is there to be gentle, to fade out, to stop once you are under. A snore breaks every part of that.

A snore is periodic and intermittent. It arrives in bursts, with gaps, and it is the gaps that keep waking you: your ear tracks the change, not the level. Masking works on the same principle in reverse. Raise the background so the gap between the snore and the room shrinks, and each burst stops being an event.

That changes three settings at once.

Continuous, not fading. The sound has to still be there when the next burst comes, so it stays flat all night rather than tapering off.

Low-weighted, not bright. Snoring energy concentrates at the bottom of the spectrum, which is also why it passes through a duvet and a pillow. Brown noise, falling 6 dB per octave, spends its output where the snore is. White noise is flat per hertz, so a large part of what you hear is treble that covers nothing, and it usually needs more level to do the same job.

Held just above the floor, not turned up to win. The target is the quiet run of ordinary snores, not the loudest one of the night. Set it against the peaks and you have swapped a noise you resent for a louder noise you chose.

Where masking stops, and when to see a GP

It does nothing for the snorer. Sound reaches your ear, not their airway, and a partner who snores every night still snores every night. If the snoring is getting worse, or it started recently, that is a change worth naming out loud rather than covering.

It will not beat the loudest peaks. A snore that runs well above your background comes through, and the only fix for that is volume you should not be running all night.

And it is not the answer when snoring is a symptom. The NHS says to see a GP if snoring comes with daytime sleepiness, breathing that stops and starts during sleep, or gasping and choking noises. Those point to sleep apnoea, which it calls serious if nobody treats it. That is a doctor’s appointment, not a fader position. The rest of this page assumes ordinary snoring in a person a doctor has already seen.

Setting the level in four moves

Set it live

The one thing that goes wrong is setting the level in a quiet room at ten o’clock and discovering at one that it is far too low. Do it while the snoring is actually happening, even if that means one bad night spent adjusting.

Come up from underneath

Start below where you think it should be and raise it in small steps. Stop at the first setting where the snoring stops pulling your attention. That point is lower than the point where you cannot hear the snoring at all, and it is the one you want.

Put the speaker on your side

Between your head and the snorer, close to you, not on the far bedside table. You are trying to raise the background at one pair of ears. A speaker across the bed raises it at both, which wakes the other person and does less for you.

Leave it on all night

No timer, or a timer set past your alarm. This is the setting where a sleep guide’s advice inverts: for falling asleep, a 45-minute timer is sensible and a quiet room afterwards is the goal. For a snorer, the quiet room afterwards is the problem.

If a single flat sound bothers you, run rain at a low level under the brown noise in the Slo mixer and keep the combined level where the brown noise alone was. Two quiet layers is the point. Two layers stacked louder is not.

Earplugs and sound together

The NHS suggests earplugs to the partner of a snorer, and they are the half of this that a speaker cannot do. Properly rolled and inserted, foam plugs take far more off the peaks than a bedroom speaker can add without becoming a nuisance in its own right. Read the rating on the packet as a laboratory figure rather than a promise; insertion decides most of it. What plugs do not give is a comfortable room, because with them in, many people end up listening to their own heartbeat and their own breathing.

The combination fixes both halves. Plugs take the peaks down. The sound, playing at a level that would seem too quiet without them, fills the space they leave. Set the level again after you put the plugs in, because everything you set beforehand is now wrong.

One paragraph on the room

Before turning anything up, the cheap moves: go to bed first, so you are asleep before the snoring starts; ask for a side-sleeping position, which the NHS lists among its self-help steps for snorers; keep the door shut, because a snore travelling down a hallway is easier to cover than one crossing a mattress. Separate rooms are the honest option that nobody lists, and plenty of couples sleep better and stay perfectly fond of each other. The World Health Organization’s noise guidance makes the same general point in a different setting: where you can reduce the source, that beats covering it.

The same setting works for noisy neighbours

Neighbour noise looks like a different problem and needs the same answer, because it has the same shape. Footsteps overhead, a television through a party wall, a door at midnight, a dog in the next garden: all periodic, all arriving as events against a quiet background, all stripped of their treble by the time they get through a wall. The remainder sits low, which is why brown noise covers it well.

So the settings carry across unchanged. Continuous, low-weighted, all night, held just above the ordinary level rather than the worst one. Placement makes the single difference: put the speaker against the wall or ceiling the noise comes through, rather than beside your head, so the background rises along the path the noise takes.

Where it fails is also the same. A bass line through a wall at midnight is not a masking problem, and no fader position makes it one.

Common questions

What sound covers snoring best?

Brown noise, then pink noise. Snoring is mostly low-frequency, and brown noise puts the most energy down there, so it sits over the snore at a lower overall level than white noise does. White noise spends much of its output in a treble range where there is nothing to cover.

Should the sound run all night or on a timer?

All night, which is the opposite of what a timer is for when you are simply falling asleep. Snoring does not stop when you drop off, and a sound that ends at 45 minutes hands you a silent room at two in the morning with the snoring still in it.

Earplugs or white noise?

Both, in that order. Foam plugs cut the loud peaks a speaker cannot cover without getting loud itself; the sound then fills the quiet the plugs leave. Plugs alone leave you listening to your own pulse, and sound alone leaves the peaks.

Will this stop the loudest snores waking me?

Not reliably. Masking works on the difference between a sound and its background, so a snore far above the background still gets through. It thins out the ordinary run of them, which is worth having and is not the same as silence.

Sources

NHS, Snoring, carries the escalation trigger. See a GP if snoring comes with daytime sleepiness, breathing that stops and starts, or gasping and choking noises, which may mean sleep apnoea.
World Health Organization (2018), Environmental Noise Guidelines for the European Region, carries the point that environmental noise disturbs sleep and that reducing the source comes first.
Riedy SM, Smith MG, Rocha S, Basner M (2021), Systematic review of the effects of white noise on sleep, Sleep Medicine Reviews 55, 101385, carries the limit on what anyone can promise. The review rated the evidence very low quality with mixed results.