Safety
What happens if you arrive in crisis — and what we won't pretend to do.
Soundscaper is wellness-adjacent listening, not clinical care. The line matters because the audience for this product overlaps with people in real distress, and the wellness category has historically been bad about the difference. Below: how crisis routing works, who shouldn't use the product, how the audio engine guards against harm, and the claims we deliberately don't make.
Crisis routing
The product blocks itself when it should.
Every intake — every word you write or speak into the wizard — passes through two safety checks before any audio is composed. A regex pre-filter catches explicit crisis vocabulary (suicide, self-harm, “can't go on”, “want to die”, and similar). A locally-running language-model classifier (Llama Guard) catches subtler indicators of distress that the regex would miss.
When either flags the input, the system does not generate a session. It routes you to the helppage, which surfaces the UK helpline (Samaritans 116 123), NHS 111's mental-health line, Mind's crisis guidance, and the international Find a Helpline directory. Real human services. Soundscaper cannot help in crisis.
Configuration that matters
SAFETY_FAIL_OPEN=false means: if the safety classifier is unavailable at intake time, the system blocks the request rather than letting it through. The default is conservative.
Who shouldn't use it
Contraindications, declared.
Every Soundscaper session opens with a headphone induction phase. Binaural-beat audio has known contraindications. We ask you to confirm none of these applies before any session with a binaural component is generated.
Photosensitive epilepsy or seizure history. Strong rhythmic, gamma, or isochronic content can in principle trigger seizures in sensitive individuals. We ask for confirmation that no such history applies.
Pacemakers and implanted cardiac devices.Conservative practitioner guidance flags binaural induction as a precaution. We don't generate sessions for users who confirm an implanted device.
Pregnancy. Where a clinician contraindicates entrainment-style audio in pregnancy, we honour that. Confirmation is requested at intake.
Under 18.Soundscaper isn't for users under 18. Account creation requires age confirmation; intake re-confirms.
Vestibular or motion-sensitivity disorders. Low-frequency or tactile-style layers can be uncomfortable. We make this an explicit confirmation point and offer composition variants without these layers.
While driving or operating machinery. Sessions that target reduced alertness — relaxation, sleep — are explicitly contraindicated for these contexts. Active-work and focus sessions are designed differently and have their own framing.
If you stop a session and feel headache, dizziness, nausea, or any atypical sensation that doesn't resolve quickly, discontinue use and consult a clinician.
Audio-side guardrails
The audio engine refuses to ship something unsafe.
Beyond the intake checks, every rendered file passes audio-quality diagnostics before it reaches you. The diagnostics aren't about whether it sounds nice — they're about whether the file falls inside the loudness, peak, and protocol envelopes we've committed to. If a render fails, the session is rejected and the credit refunded.
Integrated loudness
-16 LUFS (general) / -20 LUFS (sleep)
EBU R128 broadcast standard. Long-form quiet listening; never aggressive.
True peak ceiling
-1 dBFS
No transient ever exceeds this. Headphone-safe; equipment-safe.
High-frequency energy
conservative
No piercing transient content. Listener-fatigue-safe across a 60–90 minute session.
AM rate / depth
bounded
Amplitude modulation kept within published claim boundaries; no >4 Hz, >40% depth combinations.
Sub-20 Hz energy
filtered
Infrasound is attenuated. We don't make infrasound therapeutic claims, and we don't ship infrasound content.
Isochronic fallback
manual escalation only
Direct isochronic selection is rejected. Isochronic appears only when binaural can't be confirmed and the listener opts in.
The wellness boundary
Wellness-adjacent listening. Not clinical treatment.
The line between “wellness product addressing felt need” and “medical device treating clinical condition” is enforced by the FDA, MHRA, EU MDR, and the UK Advertising Standards Authority. We've drawn that line where we believe an honest product belongs: supporting felt states, not diagnosing or treating clinical conditions.
That's why the copy says “ease anxious worry” rather than “treat anxiety”, “sleep onset support” rather than “cures insomnia”, “dementia comfort” rather than “dementia treatment”. The discipline applies to every page on this site, every notification we ever send, and every word inside the app.
What we explicitly will not do
Categories we're not in.
- We don't run a therapist-finder service. If you need clinical help, the routes on the help page are the right ones — Samaritans, NHS 111, Mind, Find a Helpline.
- We don't claim EEG entrainment as an outcome.The clinical effects of binaural-beat audio are real; the EEG mechanism sometimes invoked to explain them is contested in the literature. We don't confuse mechanism claims with effect claims.
- We don't use solfeggio frequency claims.The 528 Hz “DNA repair” story has no support in mainstream physics or biology. We use specific tone frequencies as part of the headphone induction; we don't attribute therapeutic powers to specific tunings.
- We don't market subliminal-affirmation content. No below-perception verbal content. The composition is what it sounds like.
- We don't target minors.Account creation is 18+; there's no paediatric or family-account flow.