21:30
Descent
Light arrives at 2,200 K, the colour of the last of a fire, and begins to leave. Over forty minutes it sheds nine-tenths of itself. Beneath it, brown noise at the level of a distant road.
2,200 K → 1,800 K · 14 lux · 34 dB
Instrument 01 — Ebb
Rest is a discipline.
Ebb is a bedside instrument that shapes the light and sound of a room across the night — then leaves you alone with it.
01 / Premise
You design your desk, your kitchen, your commute. The eight hours you spend unconscious are left to a phone charger and a streetlight. Halcyon makes the instrument for that room.
0.2lux — a full moon over open ground
That is the dimmest light Ebb will ever make, and the first thing we engineered. Everything else — the brass, the wool, the sixteen emitters — exists to make that one quiet number possible, and to make the darkness after it complete.
02 / The night
One night, in five movements.
Ebb does not play a programme. It reads the room — warmth, stillness, the hour you told it — and moves light and sound through the night as a slow, continuous gesture. Scroll to follow one.
23:10
Threshold
When your breathing slows, the lens drops to ember: bright enough to find a glass of water, too faint to wake you for it. The dial is the only thing you touch all night.
1,800 K · 0.4 lux · 31 dB
01:30
Deep
Dark, truly: the emitters are cut at the supply so nothing leaks. The sound thins to pink noise that follows the hum of your own room, always three decibels beneath it.
Light off · 28 dB, room-following
04:50
Turn
Core temperature bottoms out and sleep lightens. Ebb takes the sound down to almost nothing and holds a faint, cool grey in the lens, so the room is never alarming if you surface.
5,000 K · 0.1 lux · 22 dB
06:30
Arrival
Twenty minutes before your hour the lens begins to rise: 2,700 K, then 4,000. The sound falls away entirely. You wake into a light you did not hear arrive.
2,700 → 4,000 K · 120 lux · silence
03 / Anatomy
Nothing here is decoration.
- 1
Opal lens
Sixteen emitters behind hand-polished opal glass. 1,800 to 6,500 K, and the only light we know of that goes down to 0.2 lux without shifting colour.
- 2
One-piece shell
Machined from a single billet of 6063 aluminium, anodised 40 µm in ash, then brushed by hand in one direction only.
- 3
The dial
Press to begin the night. Turn to set the hour you wake. There is no screen, because a screen is a light.
- 4
Wool grille
Merino woven in Biella, stretched over two 40 mm drivers and a passive radiator. Replaced free of charge when it tires.
- 5
Brass foot
A 1.1 kg brass core sits low in the base. It will not walk across the table, and it will not rattle.
04 / Tuning
Every unit is measured. Then signed.
Each Ebb spends a day in our anechoic chamber before it leaves the workshop. Its response is measured, its drivers trimmed by ear, and the curve printed on the card in the box.
Flat to within three decibels from 38 Hz to 20 kHz. On the underside, the initials of the person who tuned it, and a number between 0001 and 0412.
Made in Nordhavn, Copenhagen
20 Hz1001k10k20k
05 / Specification
The facts.
Ebb has been designed to need nothing from you: no account, no radio, no subscription. If anything here is unclear, write to the people who built it — studio@halcyon.example.
- Dimensions
- 236 × 114 × 114 mm2.3 kg, including the brass core.
- Shell
- 6063 aluminium, ash anodised40 µm, brushed by hand. Merino grille in charcoal.
- Light
- 16-emitter spectral array1,800–6,500 K. 0.2–180 lux at the pillow. Dimming in 0.1 lux steps.
- Sound
- Two 40 mm drivers, one passive radiator38 Hz – 20 kHz ±3 dB. 22–48 dB at the pillow. Nine generated beds, no recordings.
- Sensing
- Passive infrared, room temperature, ambient lightThere is no microphone and no camera. Nothing is recorded.
- Connectivity
- NoneNo app, no account, no radio. Firmware by USB-C, once a year, if you want it.
- Power
- 24 V external supply3.2 W asleep. Supplied with a cloth-braided cable, 2 m.
- Service
- Ten-year warrantyServiced only in Copenhagen. Thirty-night home trial, returns collected free.
What owners say
I stopped checking the time at three in the morning, because the room stopped giving me a reason to.Dr. Mireille Aubert · Sleep physiologist, Lausanne
The first object in my bedroom I don’t resent.Tobias Lindqvist · Architect
Quiet in the way a good library is quiet.Objekt Quarterly
06 / Reserve
Four hundred and twelve, built slowly.
€1,480
- Excl. tax · duties paid to EU, UK, US
- €200 deposit, refundable until it ships
- Delivered October, by hand, in a wool sleeve