Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Binaural beats

en.wikipedia.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 49 posts

Re: Binaural beats

#31

Post by redact207 »

humbledrone wrote: post #30
redact207 wrote: post #26

Many 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 (bu…

I said "apparently" as I never noticed a difference between flac and mp3.

What I read was along the lines of - one technique mp3 uses is to remove the parts of a sound file that the human ear doesn't actually hear - parts which would appear in flac and that apparently do have an effect of the beats.

Could have just been marketing hocus pocus, but who knows as all the encoded beats online appear as mp3s.

Re: Binaural beats

#32

Post by 3838 »

it's the pulsing that induces the altered states, you can use a metronome-like sound for similar results, this ones at 9hz which is mid alpha - absorbed in a good book frequency

a quick bit of supercollider code: play{SinOsc.ar(369.99,0,LFPar.kr(9))}

Re: Binaural beats

#33

Post by joedevon »

a_bonobo wrote: post #14
cLeEOGPw wrote: post #4

Knew 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.

I don't think they work at all, especially because there are no studies proving binaural beats to be good for anything (except making money?). The only blind study Wikipedia cites was published in the "Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine", which isn't really a journal at all. Edit: Found this study [1] looking at binaural beats and changes in EEG: "Analysis of changes in broad-band and narrow-band ampli…

I'm convinced they "work" when done correctly. If the current brainwave frequency is too far from the desired state, the entrainment may not work, from what I've read. I hope they do more studies.

I first found out about binaural beats and brainwave entrainment in the 80's reading a book called MegaBrain by Michael Hutchison.

I went to his seminar. There was a device that generated binaural beats via audio and some flashing lights.

I closed my eyes, put on the headphone/helmet thingie. Did the program. My mind was 100% on the ball. Pshaaaw. Felt like nothing happened. Was skeptical. Gave up on it. Took off the helmet. Stood up. And fell back into the chair. Because the brainwave entrainment put me into a sleepy state.

While I understand that placebo's are powerful, I find it hard to believe that I imagined that deep a sleep, particularly when I had decided that it didn't work.

Flash forward years later, I figured they must have an app for the iPhone by now. So I searched and found several, but settled on an app called Brain Wave, by Banzai Labs. It isn't quite as strong an effect as with the light machine combined, but it does seem to get me into a deep sleep.

I understand this is anecdotal. Try downloading an app, do a program and judge for yourself.

Re: Binaural beats

#34

Post by cLeEOGPw »

bigiain wrote: post #22
cLeEOGPw wrote: post #4

Knew 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?

I hear the "warbling", but I don't get sleepy or dizzy or whatever the described effect is it.

Re: Binaural beats

#35

Post by petercooper »

Another entrant in the fascinating club of "weird but cool sounding things tried in our teens/20s in the hope they blow your mind but invariably don't" alongside lucid dreaming, smoking banana peels, and staring at the back of someone's head to see if they can sense your voodoo powers.

Re: Binaural beats

#36

Post by swombat »

petercooper wrote: post #35

Another entrant in the fascinating club of "weird but cool sounding things tried in our teens/20s in the hope they blow your mind but invariably don't" alongside lucid dreaming, smoking banana peels, and staring at the back of someone's head to see if they can sense your voodoo powers.

Lucid dreaming is actually pretty cool and did blow my mind. It's essentially not that different to temporarily being a god, with complete control over your environment. Takes a bit of getting used to, to not wake up as soon as you realise you're lucid dreaming ("oh my god, how exciting! Wait, no, don't wake up now!"), but once you get that down, your imagination is the limit. Pretty mind-blowing imho.

Re: Binaural beats

#37

Post by paulnasca »

milkmiruku wrote: post #3

Here's some software for generating them; http://gnaural.sourceforge.net/ http://discord.sourceforge.net/ http://sbagen.sourceforge.net/ http://entrainer.sourceforge.net/

There is another open source software which generates binaural beats. The software is Paulstretch, an extreme-audio time stretching software I wrote few years ago: http://hypermammut.sourceforge.net/paulstretch/

Here is a screenshots of binaural-beats generator: http://hypermammut.sourceforge.net/paulstretch/screenshot3.p...

But I don't know if there are real psychological effects of the binaural beats :)

Re: Binaural beats

#38

Post by Dewie »

I have used brainwave entrainment before, to aid myself in meditation and to help me visualize. It did help me feel that I got into more of a meditative/trance state while using them, but sometimes it worked too well and I fell asleep (it doesn't help that I meditate lying down in my bed).

When I actively used stuff like that (many years ago), I had the impression that bineural beats in particular weren't useful. However I tried to Google it and I wasn't able to easily confirm my memory, so I guess it's up in the air for me.

Re: Binaural beats

#39

Post by smanuel »

a_bonobo wrote: post #14
cLeEOGPw wrote: post #4

Knew 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.

I don't think they work at all, especially because there are no studies proving binaural beats to be good for anything (except making money?). The only blind study Wikipedia cites was published in the "Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine", which isn't really a journal at all. Edit: Found this study [1] looking at binaural beats and changes in EEG: "Analysis of changes in broad-band and narrow-band ampli…

I'm not sure to what specific beats you've been listening to but they surely did "work". I listened to a few hemi-sync beats some time ago (http://www.hemi-sync.com/) and they've brought me the worst nightmares I've ever had. On the next they I got sick. I've also talked to people who said they've had OBE (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-of-body_experience) after listening to those beats. This never happened to me though. Just the nightmares. I guess it really depends on your current state, in what frequency these waves put your brain in, etc. So it's highly individual.

Re: Binaural beats

#40

Post by bigiain »

mdturnerphys wrote: post #28
iyulaev wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wonder if that's an evolutionary thing – somehow we evolved out the ability to retain phase difference information outside the frequencies where it's useful for stereo angular location?

The "~1000Hz" upper limit is pretty close to a 1/4 wavelength for a "phased array" of two ears ~100mm apart. That'd make it pretty ideal for angular discrimination based on phase difference.

Post reply on HN