No algorithms, no playlists, no noise
I've always needed sound to work. Not music — music pulls focus — and not silence either, which for me feels closer to pressure than calm. The thing that actually works is the texture of a place: the low-grade ambient noise of a café, a covered market, a beach where the waves come in at irregular intervals.
There are tools for this. I've used most of them. But they tend to feel like productivity software — full of controls, gamified in small ways, branded with "focus" and "deep work" language. I wanted something that felt less like a feature and more like just... being somewhere.
So I built Travelier. It's a small, hand-curated collection of ambient recordings from real locations around the world. Each one has a short atmospheric description — not a product listing, more like a paragraph from a travel essay. You pick a place, put on headphones, and listen. That's it.
No accounts. No cookies. No tracking. Fully static, hosted on Cloudflare Pages. I built it with Jekyll because I wanted the simplest thing that could possibly work, and because a site like this has no business being anything more complex.
What it is right now
A small catalogue of places: a café in Jerez de la Frontera, a beach in Southeast Asia, a few others. The recordings are real field recordings — not generated, not stock. The photography is real too. The whole thing is deliberately minimal: one place, one photo, one soundscape.
What I'm figuring out
I'm a product manager by trade, so I spend a lot of time thinking about what this actually is and who it's for. My current working answer: it's for people who already know they work better with ambient sound, and who find the existing tools too noisy (ironically) or too generic.
Long term I'm thinking about a contributor model — letting field recordists submit places — and possibly paid featured placement for businesses with a genuinely interesting acoustic environment. But that's later. Right now the priority is making the catalogue worth listening to.
Why I'm posting here
Mostly to share something I built that I'm quietly proud of, and to hear from anyone who's tried to build something in a similar space — ambient, audio, slow web. Happy to answer questions about the build (it's simple) or the thinking behind it.
