Why it ends in silence

No chime, no fade-up, no thanks for listening.

A Sheeps story does not finish so much as thin out. The fragments get further apart, the quiet between them grows, and at some point the quiet is all that is left.

There is no end-of-track sound and there will not be one. If the thing has worked you are asleep well before the audio runs out — that is the point of a story of five to sixty minutes that nobody is expected to hear the end of. A chime at that moment is an arousal event delivered exactly when you are least able to absorb one.

The most fragile minute of the night is a poor time to be told that something is over.

It is a small rule with an unreasonable number of consequences. No completion state. No next episode. No autoplay into another story. Nothing plays under the voice, so there is nothing left to stop: the voice thins out and the recording is simply over. And the renderer that makes the file is tested for exactly this — the end must carry no speech energy and no transient, so that nothing can slip in unnoticed.

The app mentions any of this exactly once, while you set it up, on the screen with a sample story, because it is news then. After that it simply does it.

The longer answer

How a Sheeps story is made shows the ending in practice: silence added between the scenes, growing to about seven seconds by the end, and nothing after the last one — no chime, no sign-off, no next episode. Falling asleep with the TV on looks at the opposite case, sound that keeps rising and falling after you have drifted off.