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.
OK, same here.
Suspect sounding claims with pseudo-science-y sounding justifications/explanations – I wasn't even interested enough to check whether I was effected that way.
> - 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.
MP3 tends to remove some of the phase information (though I don't know how applicable this would be at lower frequencies) from the signal, which would quite likely have some effect on binaural beats.
You get theese when the instruments in a section of an orchestra or band are out of tune. It's a very good "lazy" way of checking to see who's out of tune if you don't have perfect pitch.
You get theese when the instruments in a section of an orchestra or band are out of tune. It's a very good "lazy" way of checking to see who's out of tune if you don't have perfect pitch.
As pointed out elsewhere in the comments, this is different.
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;
The last time I looked at ChucK had to have been almost 5 years ago. I was doing some interesting phase shift work where I would offset one channel by a few samples. Lots of fun.
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 :)
Paulstretch and ZynAddSubFX are both great software. Thanks for writing them!
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…
It depends on whether you're using pure tones, or phase shifted audio. Binaural beats in phase shifted audio do not survive MP3 encoding, and require a high quality setting to survive Vorbis.
See also the coolest auditory illusion I know of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_tone
I can clearly hear when the tone loops, so I don't really get what's the illusion. So it is as "impossible" to hear the beginning or the end of the given scale as it is "impossible" to see when the two pictures begin and start to fade in and out.
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.
You're pretty spot on here -- up to approximately 1500Hz, the auditory brain can make use of so-called inter-aural time differences which allow estimation of a given source's azimuth. After that, phase differences become ambiguous and the brain relies more heavily on inter-aural volume differences.