The UAE has banned some of the aps. Thats what finally got me to try them out.
Binaural beats
21–30 of 49 posts
Re: Binaural beats
#22Knew about them for a long time. I am still not sure if these work for some people or not, because they don't work for me at all.
What do you mean by "work"?
Are you unable to hear the "warbling" variation at the frequency difference rate? Or are you expecting some meta-physical woowoo to happen just 'cause you're listening to it?
Re: Binaural beats
#23This can be easily heard on a piano. Just play two adjacent low notes at the same time and volume.
No, it's different. That's a real beating effect. This is an phenomenon that happens when the two tones are heard separately in each ear and the beating just happens in your head. It tells us that our auditory system retains some waveform data, up to about 1000 Hz.
This is what I find fascinating about it.
I understand from a math/physics perspective why a microphone places betwen two sound sources playing slightly different frequencies "hears" the beat pattern. I don't understand why that still works once the two individual signals have made their way into your audio nerves and brain. (If I didn't have actual work I shoukd be doing now, I suspect I'd happily drop into a 6 or 8 hour wikipedia and google mediated deep-dive laymans research session.)
Re: Binaural beats
#24Knew about them for a long time. I am still not sure if these work for some people or not, because they don't work for me at all.
What do you mean by "work"? Are you unable to hear the "warbling" variation at the frequency difference rate? Or are you expecting some meta-physical woowoo to happen just 'cause you're listening to it?
It's supposed to influence your brain waves. Also don't be such a
Re: Binaural beats
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, it's different. That's a real beating effect. This is an phenomenon that happens when the two tones are heard separately in each ear and the beating just happens in your head. It tells us that our auditory system retains some waveform data, up to about 1000 Hz.
This is what I find fascinating about it. I understand from a math/physics perspective why a microphone places betwen two sound sources playing slightly different frequencies "hears" the beat pattern. I don't understand why that still works once the two individual signals have made their way into your audio nerves and brain. (If I didn't have actual work I shoukd be doing now, I suspect I'd happily drop into a 6 or 8…
It's a phenomenon that happens to all waves, whether they are acoustic or electromagnetic. In fact, it's how your clock radio tunes to various stations. This property is a mathematical property of all waves, hence even when your brain mixes an electrical representation of the sound going into your left and right ears, you still get the effect.
Re: Binaural beats
#26Many years ago I worked on a now defunct project (RapidLingual.com) that mixed binaural beats over spoken language lessons. Binaural beats had been marketed for a long time as a 'super learning' technique that could induce a state of mind that's more focussed and receptive of a lesson (though the theory was there, there was no study that confirmed it).
Unfortunately the guy who was supposed to write the lessons never really did his part and the whole thing collapsed, but it gave me a chance to play around with it and noticed:
- Binaural beats are common in urban environments for things like air conditioner units that resonate at slightly different frequency, but pair up for a loud binaural pulse
- Adding white-noise enhances the effect of the beats (you find similar backing noise in products like Holosync)
- You can only encode to FLAC. Because of the lossy psycho-acoustic nature of Mp3 encoding, it strips out the inaudible part of waves that you apparently need
- For a trippy experience, I wrote a program that fades the screen (red-black) in sync with the beats
Re: Binaural beats
#27While we're on the subject of the brain handling things at a more raw level than you might expect, here's another interesting group of experiments: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_rotation. At university, we carried out some of Shepard and Merzlar's experiments to measure the rate at which our minds could rotate objects. Even though it subjectively feels like the mind has a graphics card that can rotate objects, it was still surprising to discover that the perception isn't an illusion—and to be able to measure our own mental rotation rates in degrees-per-second. It's not mentioned on the Wikipedia page, but I remember carrying out an experiment that showed that if it takes you, say, one second to mentally rotate an object by 60 degrees, then at the 0.5-second mark, you really do have a mental representation of an object that's rotated halfway (i.e., by 30 degrees). Maybe this isn't surprising to some people, but psychology is full of examples of the brain taking outrageous shortcuts, so it surprised me that mental rotation—which would appear to require a prohibitive amount of processing power—isn't being fudged by the brain.
Re: Binaural beats
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is what I find fascinating about it. I understand from a math/physics perspective why a microphone places betwen two sound sources playing slightly different frequencies "hears" the beat pattern. I don't understand why that still works once the two individual signals have made their way into your audio nerves and brain. (If I didn't have actual work I shoukd be doing now, I suspect I'd happily drop into a 6 or 8…
It's a phenomenon that happens to all waves, whether they are acoustic or electromagnetic. In fact, it's how your clock radio tunes to various stations. This property is a mathematical property of all waves, hence even when your brain mixes an electrical representation of the sound going into your left and right ears, you still get the effect.
For higher frequencies your auditory system doesn't retain the waveform information, so this doesn't happen.
Re: Binaural beats
#29Here's some software for generating them; http://gnaural.sourceforge.net/ http://discord.sourceforge.net/ http://sbagen.sourceforge.net/ http://entrainer.sourceforge.net/
Or, since this is Hacker News, you can use ChucK, which is a realtime programming language for processing audio: SinOsc left => dac.left; SinOsc right => dac.right; 300 => left.freq; 310 => right.freq; while (1) 1::second => now;
or:
xmms tone://300;310
Re: Binaural beats
#30Many years ago I worked on a now defunct project (RapidLingual.com) that mixed binaural beats over spoken language lessons. Binaural beats had been marketed for a long time as a 'super learning' technique that could induce a state of mind that's more focussed and receptive of a lesson (though the theory was there, there was no study that confirmed it). Unfortunately the guy who was supposed to write the lessons never…
> - You can only encode to FLAC. Because of the lossy psycho-acoustic nature of Mp3 encoding, it strips out the inaudible part of waves that you apparently need
This is not correct. You can lossily compress the audio that produces binarual beats and it's just fine. All it really is is two pitches being played, one of the left channel and one on the right. The two channels play tones that are almost the same pitch (but not quite, usually separated by 4-20 Hz). There's no inaudible part of the waves. Two sine waves work great, with no harmonics, and nothing inaudible about them. Unless your mp3 encoder is changing the pitch of the sine waves (which it isn't), it will work perfectly.
You can find all sorts of (compressed) Youtube videos with binaural beats that are reproduced correctly.