WhisperWings Aims to Bring Calm to the Cabin with its Children’s Audio Content
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WhisperWings, one of the newest members of the Airline Passenger Experience Association (APEX), is on a mission to “hush the shushers” and “bring peace to the entire cabin” with its calm, low-stimulus audio app designed to help toddlers and preschool children drift off to sleep.
Developed with child development research in mind, the WhisperWings app was built out by Michael and Ora Murphy for over a year before launching to market in April 2026. It offers three main types of audio content: bedtime lullabies, known as “Hushabies”; short story narratives; and light-hearted, thought-provoking questions for curious minds, which it calls “Wonderings.”
WhisperWings Co-Founder Michael Murphy explained, “Our favorite creations are our ‘Sherpas,’ which are gentle, whimsical characters that guide children through their audio journeys. We love Mahina the dolphin and Hootabelle the owl.”
Ora Murphy, who was the original voice of the BMW Navigation system, writes the scripts, creates the characters, and narrates the content. The music is scored by Emmy-winning composer Eric Harper, whose music has featured in more than 6,000 TV episodes as well as feature films. Its library is actively expanding, with the WhisperWings team continuously recording new songs and scripts in four primary languages: English, Spanish, French, and German. This means it naturally caters to international audiences.
“We are targeting this market because long-haul travel is highly overwhelming for little ones, and current seatback screens lack content specifically designed to soothe a child in distress.”
– Michael Murphy, WhisperWings
Children’s Content Designed to Regulate, Not to Stimulate
“The specific ‘aha moment’ for the inflight space happened recently while we were on an Edelweiss flight,” revealed Murphy. “We witnessed firsthand the stress caused by a fussy, crying toddler on a long-haul journey and realized that our product, which represents comfort, safety, and calm, was the perfect antidote to one of travel’s most stressful experiences.”
As such, the company is aggressively preparing to enter the market for the September-December 2026 airline purchasing cycle. “We are targeting this market because long-haul travel is highly overwhelming for little ones, and current seatback screens lack content specifically designed to soothe a child in distress,” said Murphy. “By partnering with airlines, we can transform a traditionally stressful journey into a gentle extension of family care.
“We’re actively designing a frictionless, zero-risk pipeline for content service providers (CSPs). Our entire audio catalog will be 100 per cent rights-cleared via Crunch Digital and ingested through Tuned Global’s enterprise cloud, meaning curators can instantly add our tracks with zero legal liability,”he continued. “From a licensing perspective, we can offer standard Category Audio-on-Demand licenses or flat-rate ‘family-tier’ deals. We are also highly open to creative co-marketing: this could include destination-tied stories for specific routes, bespoke boarding music, or even child-friendly safety audio.”
In terms of what makes it stand out from other children’s audio offering, Murphy is clear: “The creative DNA of WhisperWings is entirely human-led, with 0 per cent reliance on AI voices,” he said. “Furthermore, our unique value proposition for airlines is the ‘Halo Effect.’ We don’t need 100 per cent of passengers to use the app; by successfully comforting the few children having a hard time on a long-haul flight, we eliminate cabin-wide tension, effectively gifting a quiet, relaxing journey to everyone on board.”
You can find out more about WhisperWings and listen to some of the company’s content here.