Need help getting your baby to sleep? Try the hidden white noise feature on your iPhone

Babies can be difficult sometimes. Sometimes they’ll eat right before they nap, and other times they’ll be upset by just the suggestion of eating before they fall asleep and want to be rocked off into dreamland. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, playing sounds from a white noise machine can help calm your baby and help him calm down, giving you a moment of relaxation. And if you have iPhoneyou don’t have to spend money on a white noise machine.

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

When Apple introduced background sounds, there were six ambient sounds to loop: rain, stream, and ocean waves, which are natural sounds, and bright, balanced, and dark noise, which are different levels of white noise. When the tech giant released iOS 18 in 2024, it added two sounds: night and fire. And iOS 26 brought even more background sounds to the devices, including rain on the roof and chatter that sounds like a busy coffee shop.

If you want to use these sounds to put 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 digging into settings every time you want to turn on background sounds, here’s how you can set a switch in Control Center to turn on the feature to use on your iPhone.

1. Open up Control Center.
2. Tap the plus sign (+) in the upper left corner of the screen.
3. Touch Add a control at the bottom of the screen.
4. Touch Rumor control ( ear icon ) sub Accessibility of hearing to add to Control Center.

Once the Hearing Control icon is in Control Center, tap it to see three options: Speaker, Background Sounds, and Live Listening. Then tap the musical notes to Background sounds to turn on the feature. You can also tap the words Background sounds to open a menu to select 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 the home screen or in an app. Here’s how to set it up.

1. Touch Settings.
2. Touch Accessibility.
3. Touch Accessibility Shortcut.
4. Touch Background sounds.

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

More background sound options

If you want more control over background sounds, this is where to go.

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

At the top of this menu, you can turn on the background sounds by tapping Background sounds switch and you can change the background sound by tapping A sound and selecting a new sound.

There are two switches in this menu: Use when playing media and Stop sounds when locking. Tap the switch to Use when playing media allows background sounds to continue playing while watching a video or listening to music. And tap the switch to Stop sounds when locking ensures that background sounds will be turned off when your device is locked. If you haven’t enabled this, sounds will continue to play when your device is locked.

There are also two new menus in iOS 26: Equalizer and Mute with 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 earpiece. Stop sounds with a timer allows you to turn off background sounds at a specific time that you can choose, or after a certain amount of time has elapsed.

For more iOS news, here’s what you need to know iOS 26.5 and iOS 26.4. You can also check out ours iOS 26 cheat sheet.