Over the years I’ve had a bunch of different gentle alarm sounds. Most of them were nature sounds I edited myself. For example, once I had an owl sound that started from zero volume, but ramped up very gradually.

However, now that I use an iPhone, it hasn’t been very easy to do that. Making a custom ringtone is just stupidly convoluted, and making a custom alarm seems to be completely impossible. I need to look into that, because I really miss my great alarm sounds. The default sounds are all trash.