Up until high school, I spent my entire life locked into an ideal Norman Rockwell painting. No cares, no worries and just high on life. Things took a turn for the worse one day when I picked up an 288 tuning fork and a 320 tuning fork. I struck them both against my leg and held one up near either ear.
It was pure bliss. Like Jesus was just 32 hertz away from me. I wish I could describe the feeling. Like half of all the blades of grass in the universe were hummingbirds and the other half were bumble bees.
Let's see--I was a freshman at that time. Yeah, things just went downhill from there. I had earrings made with a tuning fork hanging from each one. The left side was A440 and the right side was a custom 444. I could raise my fingers to either lobe and flick it for instant gratification. The other kids called it ear basing. I called it god. And he was just nineteen dollars and eighty cents on Amazon [amazon.com]. By my sophomore year I was already pretty hard into Fourier transforms. Everyone's tympanic membrane had a bifurcation sweet spot that could be exploited with the right theoretical frequencies. Yeah, we would rent middle of nowhere motel rooms to smelt hematite down into custom tuning forks and poor them into clay molds in the bathtub. We paid in cash and by the time the cleaning made hit the room it was slag burns in the carpet and clay all over the place. You probably remember the 20/20 investigations following all the reports.
Shit got real heavy real quick and one day we found Scrye (nickname for the metallurgist) hemorrhaging blood out of his ears in a coma from strapping two subwoofers to either side of his head with duct tape. I knew I had to get out, but how?
We gathered up all our text books on math, audio & music theory, physics, chemistry, electronics and metalworking and burned them in the parking lot of the hospital we brought Scrye to. I would never read about science again.
Parents, heed the images of those children getting 'innocent' highs from sounds and make sure they don't make the same mistake I did. This is just a gateway to bigger and badder things. If you find literature on Fourier Analysis, Electronics or Calculus in your child's bedroom, please get your child to Oklahoma and get them help from the nearest minister. I don't care if you have to lock them up in the basement against their will. Just make sure you save them from the same fate as I... COMPLETE EAR DESTRUCTION!
There is one slight error in your very good writeup on how binaural beats works. What you described, playing two notes on two different sound producers (in this case tuning forks), causes an actual, physical, "beat". The sound waves interfere or combine with one another in physical space, and a new sound wave (or a composite of the two, same difference) is created and propogated through air, the medium of sound.
The binaural beats mentioned here work a little differently, in that a recording is pla
Except it's not the same at all. A beat from two similar frequencies is an actual acoustic effect caused by cyclic constructive and destructive interference between the two waves.
A binaural beat is a phenomenon that you only get when you listen: it's two frequencies played back via headphone so that they don't interfere. The beat is purely an artifact of your perceptions.
Not posting AC, because (having, y'know, actually familiarized myself with the topic of the story) I actually know what's going on.
If I have two tuning forks hanging on either side of my head, the sounds they produce will still interfere in the air.
If I put two earphones in and play a sine wave in each of them, the sounds will not interfere in the air. I will be hearing one tone and precisely one tone in each ear; there isn't a tone from the left bouncing off the wall and reaching my right ear.
In the first case, it is the waves in the air interfering to make the beat frequency. In the second case, the interference happens in the br
What about skeletal transduction effects? Testing on those with their corpus callosum severed should also be performed. I'd be interested also if this had any effect on the abilities of those with perfect pitch, or inducing that ability in those without it.
Audiologist here. You would think that in a perfect environment you are correct but actually Binaural beats were discovered in 1839 [web-us.com] before headphones were invented.
As someone who's done this test in a college setting, you can take the tuning forks described and start them off in front of you. You'll hear something but not a beat. Now start them and put them on either side of your head. What you hear that is different is the binaural beat.
Not posting AC, because (having, y'know, actually familiarized myself with the topic of the story) I actually know what's going on.
Ah, the armchair professor who doesn't have to cite anything.
As weird as this is to the "concerned parents and teachers" in Oklahoma, it is a basic effect of our minds and perception. There are no demons, no narcotic gateways, no pushers, and for most people, no permanent effects(*).
When the "Brain Machine" aka Sound-Light Machine (SLM) article came out in MAKE [makezine.com], I immediately built one. For me, it works great, and the visuals I see tend to be geometric patterns, depending on the frequency of the beats. It can be quite intense. For those who haven't seen this, apart from the silly graphics on the glasses as pictured in the article, the "brain machine" is a pair of safety glasses with LEDs, the microcontroller, and a headphone jack. The LEDs flash in synchronicity to the binaural beats, and this is what makes it so powerful -- your brain gets two very important senses stimulated the same way. Once the sequence finishes, the effect is totally over, there is no linger feeling, or "high" or demonic possession.
They used to sell audio cassettes that had binaural beat recordings. After I built the SLM, a friend showed me cassettes he had purchased a couple decades ago in Europe, but I haven't heard them to compare.
(*) The only caution I can think of is the possibility of bad effects in people susceptible to seizures. I don't know enough about that condition to know if seizures can be triggered through our hearing, but the SLM-like devices could possibly be a trigger to light-sensitive individuals.
One can find lots of related devices on the net. In no order are: MindSpa [hawkridgeproductions.com] Procyon AVS [amazon.com]
For helping with autism: Audio/Visual Entrainment [autismtoday.com]
Seeing this video I can't help but laugh. It's the same tired Suburbanite Scare Story that D&D was in the 70's-80's, or that "satanic cults" were in the 80's.
Sure that's how it starts, but the next thing you know kids are mixing illicit beats trying to come up with the next designer beat to get whacked out on. Next thing you know someone will find the brown note and everyone will be tripping and pooping their pants. I've seen this time and time again...
Reminds me of when I was a kid my mother went through a short lived Christianity faze where she watched TBN all the time. One of the shows (in the early 80's) had a preacher who would play heavy metal backwor
Heh, I remember using Computer Narcotics back in the 90's. At the very least there's a nice placebo effect. The guy who wrote CN was actually blind and had a BBS. Cool guy.
It's [packetstormsecurity.org] still on some shareware sites, but you need dosbox [dosbox.com] to run it on your modern win/mac/linux computer.
I found this list [lunarsight.com] of more sound and light fun. Music and visuals are definitely a mental stimulant. But Oklahoma is off their rocker;) They should ban whisky and cousins instead.
The only thing the headphones do is make sure the mixing happens in the brain. If the tuning forks are right next to your ears, you're effectively doing the same thing (the headphones work because the speakers are.....right next to your ears.
Your are correct that if the sound mixes outside of the brain, it's not effective, you just missed that there's more than one way for the 'channels' to be separate.
If binaural beats are supposed to exist only in the brain, why, when I play back the files [archive.org] linked to on wikipedia [wikipedia.org] do I hear the beat fluctuation when I listen to only one of my earphones at a time? Is VLC mixing the left and right tracks and not telling me? Is it happening on my mac? Or is the file not a real beats file?
what does it mean if you *don't* hear a beat? thats what i want to know. because I noticed that on a few of the files i found, i could tell the sound from each earphone was different, but it did not produce a beat in my brain. it was just two annoying sounds.
It means that your brain isn’t trying to recombine the sounds properly. Switch the audio mode to mono and playback the same file to have the computer combine the tracks and if you still can’t hear a beat then you must have broken the universe.
The brain tries to recombine the sounds from the left and right ear to form one panorama of sound with a sense of direction. Just like it tries to recombine the images from the left and right eye to form one image with a sense of depth.
BTW, I just spent the last 5 minutes getting high off of the wikipedia article on binaural beats, which includes audio of two examples. I am naturally skeptical of anything that claims to alter human consciousness. While I did not experience an awakening to the presence of the spirit plane or anything like that, I admit that I feel a weird emptiness behind my eyeballs, and it feels like the bridge of my nose is stuffed with cotton.
get yourself a copy of Gnaural [sourceforge.net] or SBAGen [uazu.net] and play around with the different programs. i frequently drift off to sleep with one running in my ears, and have noticed i seem to sleep fewer hours and feel more refreshed. also good for naps and creative boosts.
The wikipedia article lists the brain waves associated with certain states of consciousness. Aiming for those might be what produced the effects you describe. Might be worth researching.
there seems to be a good bit of research on it (check out The Monroe Institute [monroeinstitute.org]). the basic program i usually go with is a modified version of the base program that comes with Gnaural. it's a drop from alpha to deep sleep, with some tiny spikes every few minutes to keep you(me) from just dozing right off. it runs for forty-five minutes or so, then hangs out on delta waves. generally i "wake up" enough around here to take off headphones and nod back off. i find i sleep through the whole night more consistentl
I must be doing it wrong. I'm listening to the Binbeats2.ogg file at my desk (getting high at work! Who would have thought:D ) and all I hear is electronic popping in the background over some dodgy transporter sound effects from 1980's Star Trek. I occasionally get negative interference waves, but much higher than the frequencies the article describes. Into the hundreds of hertz.
Things took a turn for the worse one day when I picked up an 288 tuning fork and a 320 tuning fork. I struck them both against my leg and held one up near either ear. It was pure bliss. Like Jesus was just 32 hertz away from me.
That's only the beginning. I tried it with a 398 tuning fork and a 440 tuning fork and discovered the Ultimate Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything.
Shit got real heavy real quick and one day we found Scrye (nickname for the metallurgist) hemorrhaging blood out of his ears in a coma from strapping two subwoofers to either side of his head with duct tape.
Same story as always. The scene starts out all pure and idealistic, and then goes commercial and the sell-outs ruin it.
Further Down the Rabbit Hole (Score:5, Funny)
It was pure bliss. Like Jesus was just 32 hertz away from me. I wish I could describe the feeling. Like half of all the blades of grass in the universe were hummingbirds and the other half were bumble bees.
Let's see--I was a freshman at that time. Yeah, things just went downhill from there. I had earrings made with a tuning fork hanging from each one. The left side was A440 and the right side was a custom 444. I could raise my fingers to either lobe and flick it for instant gratification. The other kids called it ear basing. I called it god. And he was just nineteen dollars and eighty cents on Amazon [amazon.com]. By my sophomore year I was already pretty hard into Fourier transforms. Everyone's tympanic membrane had a bifurcation sweet spot that could be exploited with the right theoretical frequencies. Yeah, we would rent middle of nowhere motel rooms to smelt hematite down into custom tuning forks and poor them into clay molds in the bathtub. We paid in cash and by the time the cleaning made hit the room it was slag burns in the carpet and clay all over the place. You probably remember the 20/20 investigations following all the reports.
Shit got real heavy real quick and one day we found Scrye (nickname for the metallurgist) hemorrhaging blood out of his ears in a coma from strapping two subwoofers to either side of his head with duct tape. I knew I had to get out, but how?
We gathered up all our text books on math, audio & music theory, physics, chemistry, electronics and metalworking and burned them in the parking lot of the hospital we brought Scrye to. I would never read about science again.
Parents, heed the images of those children getting 'innocent' highs from sounds and make sure they don't make the same mistake I did. This is just a gateway to bigger and badder things. If you find literature on Fourier Analysis, Electronics or Calculus in your child's bedroom, please get your child to Oklahoma and get them help from the nearest minister. I don't care if you have to lock them up in the basement against their will. Just make sure you save them from the same fate as I
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Thread over. (Score:1)
Thanks for saving me time.
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That was just... that... I mean. Wow.
I'm glad I was here for that.
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If there was ever a time that Funny should affect your Karma, this is it. You made my day. /bow
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Re:Further Down the Rabbit Hole - A mistake (Score:3, Informative)
There is one slight error in your very good writeup on how binaural beats works. What you described, playing two notes on two different sound producers (in this case tuning forks), causes an actual, physical, "beat". The sound waves interfere or combine with one another in physical space, and a new sound wave (or a composite of the two, same difference) is created and propogated through air, the medium of sound.
The binaural beats mentioned here work a little differently, in that a recording is pla
Re:No Mistake (Score:5, Informative)
A binaural beat is a phenomenon that you only get when you listen: it's two frequencies played back via headphone so that they don't interfere. The beat is purely an artifact of your perceptions.
Not posting AC, because (having, y'know, actually familiarized myself with the topic of the story) I actually know what's going on.
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If I put two earphones in and play a sine wave in each of them, the sounds will not interfere in the air. I will be hearing one tone and precisely one tone in each ear; there isn't a tone from the left bouncing off the wall and reaching my right ear.
In the first case, it is the waves in the air interfering to make the beat frequency. In the second case, the interference happens in the br
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What about skeletal transduction effects? Testing on those with their corpus callosum severed should also be performed. I'd be interested also if this had any effect on the abilities of those with perfect pitch, or inducing that ability in those without it.
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So yeah. You're wrong.
Audiologist here. You would think that in a perfect environment you are correct but actually Binaural beats were discovered in 1839 [web-us.com] before headphones were invented.
As someone who's done this test in a college setting, you can take the tuning forks described and start them off in front of you. You'll hear something but not a beat. Now start them and put them on either side of your head. What you hear that is different is the binaural beat.
Not posting AC, because (having, y'know, actually familiarized myself with the topic of the story) I actually know what's going on.
Ah, the armchair professor who doesn't have to cite anything.
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The point of verbal slapstick humor is not scientific accuracy.
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let's see...... 440Hz in one ear,
444Hz in the other ear...
that sounds like a 4Hz beat in your brain to me genius....
next time read the post before you claim you know what's going on....
Re:No Mistake (Score:5, Informative)
As weird as this is to the "concerned parents and teachers" in Oklahoma, it is a basic effect of our minds and perception. There are no demons, no narcotic gateways, no pushers, and for most people, no permanent effects(*).
When the "Brain Machine" aka Sound-Light Machine (SLM) article came out in MAKE [makezine.com], I immediately built one. For me, it works great, and the visuals I see tend to be geometric patterns, depending on the frequency of the beats. It can be quite intense. For those who haven't seen this, apart from the silly graphics on the glasses as pictured in the article, the "brain machine" is a pair of safety glasses with LEDs, the microcontroller, and a headphone jack. The LEDs flash in synchronicity to the binaural beats, and this is what makes it so powerful -- your brain gets two very important senses stimulated the same way. Once the sequence finishes, the effect is totally over, there is no linger feeling, or "high" or demonic possession.
They used to sell audio cassettes that had binaural beat recordings. After I built the SLM, a friend showed me cassettes he had purchased a couple decades ago in Europe, but I haven't heard them to compare.
(*) The only caution I can think of is the possibility of bad effects in people susceptible to seizures. I don't know enough about that condition to know if seizures can be triggered through our hearing, but the SLM-like devices could possibly be a trigger to light-sensitive individuals.
One can find lots of related devices on the net. In no order are:
MindSpa [hawkridgeproductions.com]
Procyon AVS [amazon.com]
For helping with autism: Audio/Visual Entrainment [autismtoday.com]
Seeing this video I can't help but laugh. It's the same tired Suburbanite Scare Story that D&D was in the 70's-80's, or that "satanic cults" were in the 80's.
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Heh, I remember using Computer Narcotics back in the 90's. At the very least there's a nice placebo effect. The guy who wrote CN was actually blind and had a BBS. Cool guy.
It's [packetstormsecurity.org] still on some shareware sites, but you need dosbox [dosbox.com] to run it on your modern win/mac/linux computer.
I found this list [lunarsight.com] of more sound and light fun. Music and visuals are definitely a mental stimulant. But Oklahoma is off their rocker ;) They should ban whisky and cousins instead.
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The only thing the headphones do is make sure the mixing happens in the brain. If the tuning forks are right next to your ears, you're effectively doing the same thing (the headphones work because the speakers are .....right next to your ears.
Your are correct that if the sound mixes outside of the brain, it's not effective, you just missed that there's more than one way for the 'channels' to be separate.
Re:Further Down the Rabbit Hole - A mistake (Score:4, Funny)
... tuning a guitar is pretty neat to me too.
Now if we could only get more guitarists to do it...
Beats on Some Files are Audible in One Ear (Score:2)
If binaural beats are supposed to exist only in the brain, why, when I play back the files [archive.org] linked to on wikipedia [wikipedia.org] do I hear the beat fluctuation when I listen to only one of my earphones at a time? Is VLC mixing the left and right tracks and not telling me? Is it happening on my mac? Or is the file not a real beats file?
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It means that your brain isn’t trying to recombine the sounds properly. Switch the audio mode to mono and playback the same file to have the computer combine the tracks and if you still can’t hear a beat then you must have broken the universe.
The brain tries to recombine the sounds from the left and right ear to form one panorama of sound with a sense of direction. Just like it tries to recombine the images from the left and right eye to form one image with a sense of depth.
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*applause*
nicely done
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Cheers. Posts like that are why I still read slant point.
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You sir are my new hero!
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So full of win.
BTW, I just spent the last 5 minutes getting high off of the wikipedia article on binaural beats, which includes audio of two examples. I am naturally skeptical of anything that claims to alter human consciousness. While I did not experience an awakening to the presence of the spirit plane or anything like that, I admit that I feel a weird emptiness behind my eyeballs, and it feels like the bridge of my nose is stuffed with cotton.
Something definitely happened in my brain.
Re:Further Down the Rabbit Hole (Score:4, Interesting)
get yourself a copy of Gnaural [sourceforge.net] or SBAGen [uazu.net] and play around with the different programs. i frequently drift off to sleep with one running in my ears, and have noticed i seem to sleep fewer hours and feel more refreshed. also good for naps and creative boosts.
oh, and *slow-clap* to the gp. well done, sir.
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I read that as "in my cars". I'm bloody glad I read it again :-)
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there seems to be a good bit of research on it (check out The Monroe Institute [monroeinstitute.org]). the basic program i usually go with is a modified version of the base program that comes with Gnaural. it's a drop from alpha to deep sleep, with some tiny spikes every few minutes to keep you(me) from just dozing right off. it runs for forty-five minutes or so, then hangs out on delta waves. generally i "wake up" enough around here to take off headphones and nod back off. i find i sleep through the whole night more consistentl
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I am naturally skeptical of anything that claims to alter human consciousness.
Not even a hammer blow to the head?
I experimented with a binaural beats generator several years ago. Nothing happened as far as I can tell, but I didn't expect anything either.
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The real danger that they're worried about comes from the aural/mental stimulation called "education".
In many people's minds, that's much more damaging to your consciousness than things like music or a blow to the head.
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I knew there was a reason I read this idle article. You win the internet forever.
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Thank you, this is the best post of 2010.
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Re:Further Down the Rabbit Hole (Score:4, Funny)
Things took a turn for the worse one day when I picked up an 288 tuning fork and a 320 tuning fork. I struck them both against my leg and held one up near either ear. It was pure bliss. Like Jesus was just 32 hertz away from me.
That's only the beginning. I tried it with a 398 tuning fork and a 440 tuning fork and discovered the Ultimate Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything.
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Shit got real heavy real quick and one day we found Scrye (nickname for the metallurgist) hemorrhaging blood out of his ears in a coma from strapping two subwoofers to either side of his head with duct tape.
Same story as always. The scene starts out all pure and idealistic, and then goes commercial and the sell-outs ruin it.
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I have been reading Slashdot for a long time, but I have to say that this was easily the best comment I have ever seen here. Well done.
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Care to tell me how the fsck am I going to clean the pee off the recliner?
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