My OperaBrainwave Entrainment
Monday, December 31, 2007 2:18:07 AM
Several days ago, someone on irc talked about an application called i-doser, which claims to give you the effects of drugs, just by having you listen to some sounds, which are called binaural beats. While this claim is a pretty high one, and most likely not a very holdable one, it still got me interested into how they actually are trying to do this:
They are utilizing something called brainwave synchronisation, a method to alter your brainwaves by a outer stimulus, which pulsates at a certain frequency. The brainwaves tend to pulsate(?) at the same frequency, when given such an outer stimulus, may it be accustic or visual.
Brainwave frequencys are linked to different states of mind, like altertness, thinking, sleeping and unconsciousness.
Most of these frequencys are at a very low Hz-level, which makes it unhearable for the human ear, which goes down till around 18 Hz. So if you want something lower you will have to work with those tricky binaural beats, which are actually just something made up by your brain. If you have a sinus sound with 300 Hz on one ear, and 310 Hz on the other, your brain will make you hear a 10 Hz pulsation, which actually isn't there. So i experimented around with sbagen, which actually is the binaural beat engine of the former meant commercial tool. At first i compressed them to flac, but it turns out, that a mp3 is good also, if you make sure to encode each stereo channel separetely, the following command did the job for me:
Having those on my iPod is already quite interesting, but a combination of visual and accustic stimuli would be more effective as i imagined. I thought a bit about how to built a device for that with a microcontroller, but put that aside for a while.
Today i looked at some videos of the recent 24C3, and the one called "make cool things with microcontrollers" catched my attention, and funnily i was totally stunned, when i realized, that quite a big amount is about building a device called brain machine, built by Mitch Altman, inventor of TV-B-Gone, published in the makezine.
So:
They are utilizing something called brainwave synchronisation, a method to alter your brainwaves by a outer stimulus, which pulsates at a certain frequency. The brainwaves tend to pulsate(?) at the same frequency, when given such an outer stimulus, may it be accustic or visual.
Brainwave frequencys are linked to different states of mind, like altertness, thinking, sleeping and unconsciousness.
Most of these frequencys are at a very low Hz-level, which makes it unhearable for the human ear, which goes down till around 18 Hz. So if you want something lower you will have to work with those tricky binaural beats, which are actually just something made up by your brain. If you have a sinus sound with 300 Hz on one ear, and 310 Hz on the other, your brain will make you hear a 10 Hz pulsation, which actually isn't there. So i experimented around with sbagen, which actually is the binaural beat engine of the former meant commercial tool. At first i compressed them to flac, but it turns out, that a mp3 is good also, if you make sure to encode each stereo channel separetely, the following command did the job for me:
for i in `ls *.wav`; do lame -h -V 0 -b 192 $i $i.mp3;done
Having those on my iPod is already quite interesting, but a combination of visual and accustic stimuli would be more effective as i imagined. I thought a bit about how to built a device for that with a microcontroller, but put that aside for a while.
Today i looked at some videos of the recent 24C3, and the one called "make cool things with microcontrollers" catched my attention, and funnily i was totally stunned, when i realized, that quite a big amount is about building a device called brain machine, built by Mitch Altman, inventor of TV-B-Gone, published in the makezine.
So:
- Mitch Altman is a totally crazy guy with funny hear and good ideas
- I have to order some microcontrollers
- http://www.ladyada.net/ is a most interesting site.
- I'll have to visit the 25C3
- I have around 3 gigs of binaural beats :>
