My wife and I had just had a baby, and we were deep in the zombie phase — the middle-of-the-night feeds where you desperately want to sleep, your little one is screaming, and they haven't quite figured out how to be alive yet. It's a beautiful time. It's also a brutal one. Anything you can do to make life a little easier for yourself and for the baby, you'll gladly do.

So I was shushing them. Just a gentle "shhhhh.....", over and over, the way you're supposed to. And somewhere in there I thought: wouldn't it be cool if something could just do this?

That got me thinking about the tape recorder I had as a kid — and about my day job producing and writing music, where I work with tape delays and tape loops all the time. As a kid I used to splice real tape with sticky tape to make literal loops for hours that would just go round and round and round. It struck me as a slightly overcomplicated but genuinely lovely way to build a shush machine for my son.

So I started making one. That's how Somnideck began.