How to record your baby's voice as a keepsake

Record short clips often, in a quiet room, with the phone about 30cm from your baby while they are already making noise. Then keep each clip next to a photo from the same day and write the date on it. A recording called New Recording 47 sitting in Voice Memos is one you will struggle to place in five years.

Record your baby's voice on an iPhone

1Find a quiet room. Turn off the fan, the TV and the dishwasher, and close the window. A nursery with curtains and soft furnishings gives a warmer sound than a tiled kitchen.
2Silence the phone. Turn on Do Not Disturb so a message alert does not land in the middle of the first laugh.
3Get close. Hold the phone 20 to 30cm from your baby's mouth with the bottom edge, where the microphone is, pointing toward them.
4Record when they are already making noise. After a feed, during bath time, or in the middle of a game that makes them giggle. You cannot ask a four-month-old to perform, so start recording before the sound you want.
5Keep it short. Ten seconds holds a laugh or a run of babble. Trim the silence at the start and end so the clip plays straight into the sound.
6Date it and pair it with a photo. Rename the clip with the date and what was happening, and keep it beside a photo taken the same day.

What to record in the first year

The newborn weeks: the squeaks, grunts and hiccups that disappear within a month or two and that every parent says they wish they had recorded.

Around two months, cooing. Around three to four months, the first proper laugh, usually set off by something unexpected like a sneeze or a dog. By six or seven months, babbling that sounds like sentences in a language nobody speaks, and toward the first birthday, a sound that might be a word if you are generous.

Record your own voice too. The song you sing at bedtime, the way you say their name, the story you make up at 3am. Children grow up wanting to hear what their parents sounded like when they were small, and those clips are rarer than the baby ones.

Getting a clean recording on an iPhone

Voice Memos is already on the phone and is good enough. In Settings, Apps, Voice Memos, set Audio Quality to Lossless. After recording, the edit screen has an Enhance Recording option that cuts room hiss without making the voice sound processed.

A short video works too, and gives you the picture with the sound. The catch is that a video sits among thousands of others in the camera roll, so it needs the same dating and sorting as an audio clip.

Skip the external microphone. At 30cm in a quiet room the phone's own microphone is clear, and setting up gear is the quickest way to miss the moment.

Keeping the voice with the picture

A voice recording on its own is hard to place. A photo on its own is silent. Put them together and you get the whole day: what they looked like and what they sounded like.

Little lets you add a voice note of up to ten seconds to a scrapbook page. You place the speaker anywhere on the page and tap it to play while you flip through, and a flip-through video of the scrapbook plays the voice notes as it turns the pages.

The recordings stay on your iPhone with the rest of your memories. There is no account and no upload.

A scrapbook page in Little showing a baby on a slide with teddy bears, part of an eight-page book — A scrapbook page in Little. A voice note sits on the page as a small speaker you tap to play.

The laugh, on the page it belongs to

Scrapbooks are free in Little, and voice notes come with a paid plan. Recordings never leave your iPhone. On the App Store for iPhone and iPad, iOS 17 and later.

Backing up baby voice recordings

Keep two copies. Voice Memos syncs through iCloud if you turn it on in iCloud settings, and any clip can be shared to Files or saved to a computer as an .m4a file, which every device will still open in twenty years.

Recordings inside Little are part of your iPhone's own backup, the same as your photos. Make sure iCloud Backup is on, or back the phone up to a computer, before you upgrade or replace it.

Questions parents ask

How long should a baby voice recording be?

Ten seconds or less for a keepsake clip. Short recordings get listened to again; a ten-minute file of mostly silence does not. Record a few short clips rather than one long one.

When do babies start laughing out loud?

Most babies laugh for the first time at around three to four months, though some start earlier or later. Keep the phone nearby during play at that age so you catch it.