If Your Baby’s Not Sleeping, Try Your iPhone’s Hidden White Noise Feature

Babies can be difficult. They eat all the time, pee and poop wherever they want, and may not sleep at night, especially during sleep regressions. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, playing the sounds of a white noise machine can help soothe your baby and get him or her to settle down, giving you a moment of respite. And if you have a iPhoneyou don’t need to spend money on a white noise machine.

When Apple released iOS 15 in 2021, the operating system introduced a hidden feature called Background Sounds. It lets you turn your iPhone into a white noise machine, and you can play these sounds alone or under a podcast, music, or video streaming app.

When Apple introduced background sounds, there were six ambient sounds to play in a loop: rain, streams, and ocean waves, which are natural sounds, and clean, balanced, and dark noises, which are different pitches of white noise. When the tech giant released iOS 18 in 2024, it added two sounds: night and fire. And iOS26 brought even more background noise to the devices, including rain on the roof and chatter, which sounds like a bustling cafe.

If you want to use these sounds to put a baby to sleep, or for any other reason, here’s how to enable background sounds on your iPhone.

How to access background sounds from your Control Center

Instead of searching through Settings every time you want to enable background sounds, here’s how to set a toggle in Control Center to enable the feature for use on your iPhone.

1. Open Control center.
2. Tap the plus sign (+) at the top left of your screen.
3. Faucet Add a control near the bottom of your screen.
4. Faucet Hearing command (ear icon) under Hearing accessibility to add to the Control Center.

Once you have the hearing control icon in Control Center, tap it to see three options: Speaker, Background Sounds, and Live Listen. Then tap on the musical notes next to Background sounds to enable the feature. You can also tap on the words Background sounds to open a menu to choose a different background sound as well as adjust the volume.

Use accessibility shortcuts for background sounds

You can also set up an accessibility shortcut to turn background sounds on or off from your Home screen or in an app. Here’s how to configure it.

1. Faucet Settings.
2. Faucet Accessibility.
3. Faucet Accessibility shortcut.
4. Faucet Background sounds.

Now, when you triple-press the side button on your iPhone, background sounds will activate. You can press the button three times again to turn it off.

More background sound options

If you want more control over background sounds, here’s where to go.

1. Faucet Settings.
2. Faucet Accessibility.
3. Faucet Audio and visual.
4. Faucet Background sounds.

At the top of this menu you can enable background sounds by pressing the button Background sounds toggle, and you can change the background sound by pressing Her and choose a new sound.

There are two toggles in this menu: Use when playing media And Stop sounds when locked. By pressing the button next to Use when playing media allows background sounds to continue playing while you watch a video or listen to music. And pressing the button next to Stop sounds when locked ensures that background sounds turn off when your device locks. If this option is not enabled, sounds will continue to play when your device locks.

There are also two new menus in iOS 26: Equalizer and Stop Sounds with a Timer. The equalizer allows you to adjust the tone and contour of background sounds, as well as balance more towards the right or left speaker or headphones. Stop sounds with a timer allows you to turn off background sounds at a specific time you can choose or after a certain amount of time.

For more iOS news, here’s what you need to know iOS 26.4 And iOS 26.3. You can also view our iOS 26 Cheat Sheet.

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