Plenty of software features on your phone promise to make you more productive, with iOS 18 boasting more than its share. But the iOS 18.4 update takes things a step further, adding a new capability that aims to bring a productivity-boosting soundtrack to your iPhone.
Specifically, iOS 18.4 introduces an ambient music feature to the Control Center that lets you play tunes in the background. In addition to a productivity option, ambient music genres include "chill" for more relaxing tunes and "wellbeing," which seems geared toward being the soundtrack of any mindfulness or meditation sessions you engage in. Finally, a "sleep" mode includes sounds geared toward lulling you off to dreamland.
My ears pricked up when I heard about the arrival of ambient music in iOS 18.4. That's because I'm always looking for ways to stay focused when I'm trying to complete a task, and music often plays a big role in that.
The importance of background music
I like to play music as I work, and since I work remotely, I don't have to worry about donning the best headphones to keep my taste in music from distracting others. So when it's time to hunker down and work on a project, I usually wind up launching the Music app on my Mac or iPhone, hitting the shuffle button and getting down to business while the randomized playlist goes from one song to the next.
There's an issue with this approach, though. Because a lot of my work involves writing, I find that some times music can be a distraction, particularly when we're talking about songs with lyrics. It's not really helpful when I'm trying to describe some of the finer points of, say, Apple Intelligence, and all of a sudden "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" starts playing, distracting a part of my brain that's trying to explain how to get the most out of Writing Tools to instead focus on whatever the hell it is Iron Butterfly is singing about.
True, I could create a playlist of instrumental songs, saving me the embarrassment of inadvertently transposing the lyrics of "She's a Rainbow" when I'm writing about iPhone 16 color options. But since I like a variety of audio playing in the background, it'd have to be a very long playlist. And why go through the trouble of creating a playlist when Apple can do it for me?
That's the promise of ambient music — it can play in the background, doing just enough to stimulate the brain with particular beats and rhythms optimized for specific tasks like productivity or relaxation, without making you think about lyrics or artists or who opened for Guns N' Roses on the Appetite for Destruction tour. It's a solution long discovered by people like my wife who plays ambient music via YouTube when she needs to concentrate on a task, but now it's right there on my iPhone, giving me a convenient way of trying ambient music for myself.
Getting started with ambient music in iOS 18.4
To access ambient music in iOS 18.4, you're going to want to start in the Control Center section of your iPhone. Just swipe diagonally from the upper right corner of the home screen to bring up Control Center.
You're going to need to customize Control Center in iOS 18 to add ambient music controls. Press and hold anywhere on the screen to edit Control Center, and then tap Add a Control at the bottom of the page.
On the subsequent screen, scroll down to the Ambient Music section, and then select the particular genre you want to add to the Control Center — Sleep, Chill, Productivity or Wellbeing. You can add one or even multiple controls if you have the space.
Once you've got an ambient music control in the Control Center, all you have to do is tap on that control any time you want to play music in the background. You can then pause or stop the music using your iPhone's regular playback controls.
If you really enjoy ambient music, you can use the ability to customize lock screen controls in iOS 18 to add an ambient music control to the bottom of your lock screen. That way, you can just control music playback from there.
My experience with ambient music in iOS 18.4
With the iOS 18.4 public beta installed on my phone, I've been trying out most of the different ambient music genres, with a particular focus on the Productivity tunes. (I haven't played anything from Sleep, as I don't need any help falling asleep these days — and certainly not during work hours.)
The genres sound pretty distinct to my ears. Productivity offers a very synthesized sound, with steady, rhythmic beats that are clearly intended to keep you pounding away at the work in front of you while Chill has much more mellow tone. The Wellbeing sound relies heavily on piano, to the point where it sounded like the kind of ambient music that plays in the waiting room a funeral parlor. I'm not sure if that would contribute to my sense of well-being.
As for the Productivity tunes, I certainly never felt the urge to glance at the playback controls on my iPhone to see if there was an artist or title to the song. (If I had, all I would have seen would be a generic title like "Momentum Beats.") In that sense, iOS 18's Ambient Music feature is serving its purpose — fill the air with enough sound to keep my brain stimulated but not to the point of distraction.
If I have one complaint about Ambient Music, it's that you have to set different controls for the different genres — there doesn't appear to be any way to toggle from Productivity over to, say, Chill without setting up separate controls in the Control Center. If you're really into ambient music, that's a lot of space to devote to one feature.
iOS 18 Ambient music outlook
Ambient music is available on any phone that can run iOS 18.4. It's not Apple Intelligence-specific as so many new features are these days, so anyone with an older iPhone can enjoy just as easily as an iPhone 16 owner.
Not everyone's going to embrace the feature, not even music lovers. If you don't find background music to be particularly helpful for your state of mind, then Ambient Music won't have much to offer you. But if you are like me and need something playing as you work, this is definitely an iOS 18 feature you need to try.
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