A ticking clock is the cheapest tension device in film. It works because it is metronomic: the audience starts counting without deciding to. That also makes it unforgiving, because a loop that does not line up is obvious immediately. Generating your own lets you render a tick at the tempo your scene needs, without time-stretching someone else's and hearing the artefacts.
Every clip shows the exact prompt that produced it. The render script reads its prompts from the same file as this page. Copy one, change a word and generate your own.
wall clock ticking steadily once per second, dry mechanical tick with a small internal rattle, quiet room, seamless loop
large grandfather clock pendulum swinging, heavy slow wooden tock every second, hallway reverb, seamless loop
grandfather clock striking the hour, deep resonant chimes with a long decay in a wood-panelled hall
vintage twin-bell alarm clock ringing violently, hammer striking metal bells, bedside close mic
digital alarm clock beeping in short insistent triplets, thin piezo tone, close mic, quiet bedroom
mechanical stopwatch button clicked to start, then fine rapid ticking, very close mic, dry
mechanical kitchen timer wound up and released, ratcheting then a fine ticking countdown, close mic
kitchen timer reaching zero and striking a single bright bell, close mic, kitchen reverb
clock ticking and gradually accelerating in tempo, mechanical ticks growing frantic, dry and close
digital countdown timer beeping once per second with a rising pitch as it nears zero, tense and dry
These models respond to physical description. Name the material, the action and the space.
wall clock ticking steadily once per second, dry mechanical tick with a small internal rattle, quiet room, seamless loop
"Once per second" fixes the tempo, and "seamless loop" tells the model to keep it even end to end, so it holds up under a long scene.
large grandfather clock pendulum swinging, heavy slow wooden tock every second, hallway reverb, seamless loop
"Tock" in place of "tick" lands the sound about an octave lower, so it reads as a much bigger mechanism.
digital countdown timer beeping once per second with a rising pitch as it nears zero, tense and dry
Writing the escalation into the prompt saves an automation pass, and the model's version drifts smoothly instead of in even steps.
vintage twin-bell alarm clock ringing violently, hammer striking metal bells, bedside close mic
Describing the mechanism (a hammer between two bells) produces the characteristic stutter that a plain "alarm" prompt lacks.
Clocks are one of the few sound families where these models follow an explicit rate, because "once per second" is a common phrase in the training captions and an unambiguous physical description. Use it. For other rates, write the interval in words ("twice per second", "a slow tick every two seconds") and do not try to correct the timing afterwards: time-stretching a tick audibly changes its timbre.
The same tick sounds ordinary in a kitchen and menacing in an empty hallway; the only difference is the reflection. Long, hard, empty spaces let each tick ring slightly and leave a gap of silence that the audience fills. If a ticking bed is not working, change the space first ("hallway reverb", "large empty room", "wood-panelled hall") and keep the tick itself dry and simple.
Most ticking beds end with something: a bell, a stop, an alarm, a cut to silence. Libraries sell the loop and leave you to find the ending elsewhere, which is why so many countdowns end with an obvious splice. Render the ending as its own short clip in the same session (the timer bell in this collection is one) so the two share a character and cut together cleanly.
The models run on your machine, which changes the cost, the privacy and what you can automate.
Weights are fetched once. After that, generation, the library and the API all work with the network off. Everything lives in one SQLite file and one folder of WAVs under ~/.soundbox, and nothing is uploaded.
Soundbox runs an MCP server in the same process, with tools for generating and listing sounds. Generated files come back as absolute paths, so an agent can copy them into a project.
Every model's terms are shown before you download it, and non-commercial weights need an explicit confirmation. Soundbox is MIT. The licence of the model that made a sound governs what you may do with it.
claude mcp add --transport http soundbox http://127.0.0.1:17494/mcpcurl -X POST http://127.0.0.1:17494/api/generate \
-H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
-d '{"model":"audiocpp-stable-audio-3-sfx","prompt":"8-bit coin pickup blip","duration_s":1}'