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White noise or lullabies for baby sleep?
What white noise and lullabies each do, what neither does, and how to choose for your baby. Written by people who make lullabies, so read it knowing that.
We make lullabies. Keep that in mind while you read this, because it means we are not neutral. But the honest answer to the question is not "lullabies", and it is not "white noise" either. It is: they do different jobs, and most babies end up with one or the other for reasons that have nothing to do with which is better.
What white noise does
White noise is a constant, unchanging sound. Its whole point is that nothing in it changes. It sits over the noises of the house, a door, a sibling, a road, so that those noises are less of a jump against the background. It does not send a baby to sleep. It stops things waking a baby up.
It is also the same at 7pm and at 3am. There is no melody to finish, no phrase to end. That is what people like about it, and it is also what makes it sound like a hairdryer, because it is roughly the sound of a hairdryer.
What a lullaby does
A lullaby is music, so it changes. It has a melody, it rises and falls, it has an end. That is the opposite of white noise, and it is the reason lullabies exist: a slow, quiet tune settles a baby in the arms, before the cot.
A good sleep lullaby does as little of that changing as it can get away with. Slow, quiet, no sudden lift, no key change. Our long ones are instrumental and run for hours, which is our attempt to keep the settling of music without the waking of a song ending. Whether that works for your baby is something only your baby can tell you.
What neither does
Neither one is a sleep method. A baby who is hungry or too hot is not going to be sung or hushed past that. Sound is the last layer, not the first.
And neither should be loud. Whatever you use, keep it quiet and keep the speaker away from the cot. Your health visitor or paediatrician can tell you what "quiet" means in your room. We would rather you asked them than trusted a number from a website, including this one.
How to choose
- Noisy house, light sleeper: try white noise first. The job is masking, and masking is what it does.
- Settling at bedtime is the hard part: try a lullaby. Music does the calming; noise does not.
- Both: plenty of families run a lullaby for the settling and white noise for the night. There is no rule against it.
- Neither: also fine. Plenty of babies sleep in silence, and a silent room is not a problem to solve.
If you want to try ours, the sleep music page lists all of them with their running times. The longest is eleven hours.