How do I turn off the canned music in photo memories?

Sometimes the Memories are occurring in the search results, and I am accidentally opening a memory, before I have remembered to silence the iPhone or Mac. It is so embarrassing, when I am not alone (for example commuting or in a waiting room), when my devices start playing music all of a sudden. We need a setting that allows us to silence Memories by default, when they start playing.

Have you tried John Cage's famous composition 4'33"?

I have tried that, but any song I create on my own will give the error message "Not supported". I can select any song from Apple Music, but it is hard to find any Apple Music that is perfectly silent.

Silencing the iPhone before I open the Memory movie works, but but I am getting frequently trapped into opening a Memory Movie accidentally. They are turning up everywhere as a suggsted item - on the Lock Screen, in the widgets on the Home Screen, as "For You" items in Photos, and it is not always obvious that clicking the item will make make a lot of noise and be highly embarrassing, because everyone in the same room will look daggers at me until I manage to silence the device. The least thing Apple could do would be to give us a choice, before the background music starts playing.

It cannot be disabled permanently, and we cannot change the Settings to use a less annoying backing track as a default. I am muting my iPhone before I open a memory.

We can change the music for the background music, once the Memory Video is playing, but we have to select some music. There is no "silent" option, we can only select the least annoying option. So we have to endure the background music until we find a song that we can stand in our music Library. Silencing the iPhone is the quickest method to be able to watch the memory without irritating noise right from the start.

Yes, I silence the phone first, or lunge for the switch as soon as Apple’s inappropriate stuff starts flowing from the can.

I’d really like to be able to record something better than silence for myself (e.g. waves crashing for my cliff top photos) or at least have the option of a silent default.

Léonie:

Have you considered creating a 3+ minute silence track in GarageBand, add it to your Music library and switch to it in Memories?

Well, there's always this:

I'm not that brave! 😄