Play Background Sounds on the iPad

Learn how to set a background sound to play, including setting the type of sound and the background sound volume, on the iPad.

Learn how to set a background sound, such as rain, bright noise, or ocean to play on your iPad. Also learn how to adjust the volume of that sound compared to the iPad’s volume. This feature was introduced with iPadOS 15 and you can easily access all the settings directly from the Control Center. Learn about background sounds in this video for the iPad.

Video TranscriptIn this video, I’m going to show you how you can play background sounds on the iPad. When we play background sounds, what we’re able to do is just play a sound in the background. We can make it subtle, we can adjust the volume of that background sound, and have it play in the background while we’re working, or even while we’re sleeping. We can select from different types of sounds such as rain, stream, our bright noise. Let’s see how we do this. Let’s go to my iPad.

Now, the first thing we need to do is we need to customize our Control Center. This is how we can easily access background sounds, through the Control Center. So now what I’m going to do is open up my Settings app. We go over to our Control Center. This is where I can customize my controls. We have our Included Controls. So these are all the controls that are included in your Control Center. And then when I swipe, I have More Controls. I can add these controls. What we need to do is we need to add our Hearing control. This is how we access our background sounds. So I tap on the green plus. It now added it to my Control Center. So let’s get out of our Settings app and go back to our Home Screen. I press on the Home button. We’re back at my Home Screen.

Now, what I want to do is I want to play some background sounds. Maybe I’m in a loud environment. I just want to have some subtle background sounds playing as I have my earbuds in, or my air pods in, or maybe I’m at a hotel. I want to play some background sounds while I sleep.

All we have to do now is just go to our Control Center and you’re going to see we have our Hearing control. I tap on this and we have Background Sounds. From here I just tap on this and it’ll start playing background sounds. Right now, it is playing Rain. I have the volume turned down, so you’re not going to be able to hear it, but the iPad is playing background sounds. It is playing Rain.

What we can do is we can adjust the volume of that background sound. This is going to be outside of the volume of the iPad. So let’s say you’re watching a movie. You want to have a little bit of background sound to drown out the outside noise, or maybe what you want to do is just listen to a podcast and you want to have some background sound to drown out the noise. So you need that background sound to be a little bit quiet. You don’t want it to be too loud. You don’t want it to overpower the movie or the podcast. Well, then what you do is you just set the volume to be low. This is only for the background sound, not for the overall volume of the iPad. So the background sound in this case, Rain, is going to be relatively quiet compared to my iPad.

But now let’s say you’re sleeping. You’re at a hotel. You want to have some background sound playing in the background while you sleep. You want to have that a little bit louder then because you’re going to be using that as your main audio, the background sound. Well, when you’re in that scenario, you just drag this over to the right, and now what it’ll do is it’ll play that background sound louder. So that’s why you may want to adjust the volume of your background sound.

Now, what about the background sound itself right now? It is Rain. Maybe you want to change it to Bright Noise, or you want to have a stream playing in the background. How do you change the sound? Well, all you have to do is just tap on this, and from here, you can select from a number of different background sounds. You can play Balanced Noise, Bright Noise, Dark Noise, Ocean Rain, and Stream. Once you have all your settings set, you just tap outside here to close our Control Center and that background noise will continue playing while you’re.

So, how do we turn that off? Maybe I no longer want to have that background sound play. To do that, we just go back up to our Control Center. We go over to our Hearing and then we tap on the blue button down here. When I tap on this, it turns background sounds off. I can also use this button to turn it on.

So that’s how we use background sounds through the Control Center on the iPad. With background sounds, what we’re able to do is play sound in the background. This could be bright noise, rain stream, or an ocean. We can adjust the volume of that background noise compared to the volume of our iPad. We can make it quiet relative to everything else with the iPad, or we can make a little bit louder. I find the easiest way to do this is through the Control Center. You can also access this through Accessibility, but if you add the Hearing control to the Control Center, through the Settings app, what you’re able to do is access your Background sounds straight through the Control Center. We can adjust the volume. We can adjust what sounds are playing.

So that’s how we use background sounds or play background sounds on the iPad.