The Background Sounds feature on iOS will let you play audio, such as white noise, in the background as you’re doing your work. This will even play when the device is locked or over videos if you want it to, and there are several different types of noise you can choose from.

To get started, jump into the Settings app, and then we’re going to scroll down to Accessibility. From here, we’re looking for the Audio and Visual option, which will give us the option here to go into Background Sounds. From this screen, we’ve got a toggle right at the top to enable Background Sounds, and as soon as I flick that on, you’ll hear that noise start playing in the background. You can control the volume on this screen as well, and here if we tap on the sounds, we can choose what sound effect we have playing. There are a few to choose from. I quite like Ocean, and you can hear it change when I select that new choice.

If I go back a level, I can also change if I want the sound to be playing all the time or only some of the time. So, I’m going to turn it off so it doesn’t play when media is playing. So, if I was listening to a music track or perhaps a video, the background sound would stop and then come back again afterwards.

Now, you can enable and disable Background Sounds from this menu. There’s an even quicker way if you’re going to use it quite often. If we jump back to the top level of Accessibility and then scroll right down to the bottom, we’ll find the option for the Accessibility Shortcut. From here, you can tap and select as many accessibility features as you like, and a floating menu will pop up when you triple press the Home button or the top button on your iPad. I’m just going to choose Background Sounds and Colour Filters here. Then, when I leave the app and go elsewhere on my iPad, I can simply press the lock button three times, and then I can enable or disable Background Sounds no matter what I’m doing on my iPad.

This is a really handy feature to help improve concentration, to reduce noise around you, and to help you really focus on the learning or the work you’re doing on your device.