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Electronic Music other: Binaural beats in music?
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Written March 29 2009 , Tags: binaural beats, music, techno
Lately iv'e been messing around with binaural beats and was wondering if they lose effectiveness when there is other music playing with it. Because of the way they work im thinking that the other frequencies might mess up the desired effects. Either way the sound from it does sound nice in ambient type tracks. One possibility i came up with is to use near ultrasonic frequencies for the binaural beats giving a good separation from the lower musical frequencies. Tell me your thoughts on it.
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It only really works on headphones, doesn't it?
I'm not really a fan of box-panning anything to be honest. Good idea about using the ultra high freqs though,. i found that some samples from the focus folder of sbagen really does help with concentration. but i get really annoyed with those with pink noise.
I've done a bit of experiments and research with binaurals and ambient music and finally came up with this. It's ambient music, but it's in tune with the average of the carrier frequencies. The binaural frequency starts at a roughly 15hz and slowly descends to about 4hz over 25mins and rises again at the end. If you listen with headphones, you will hear the binaural beating patterns, but if you listen to only the left or the right channel, any obvious beating is between the carrier and the fundamental of the ambient pads. If you have any mellow trippy experiences while listening to this, I'd love to hear about it. Best served in a dark room while lying down
link oh that's nice. It actually manages to change the quality of my tinnitus.
ia couple things to consider:
- rhythm in the music. if there are other rhythms more dominant than the beating, your state of mind may be more influenced by those. - frequency. not sure of the exact consequences of this, but the head's fixed size means we hear phase differences in different ways throughout the frequency spectrum. binaural beats might be most effective in a specific range. fwiw personally i think the perceptual effects of beating are more exciting than the theoretical brainwave entrainment effects.
Recent blogs: my new USB MIDI controller
I think that the repeating sounds in my ambient piece above actually loop around at relative intervals to the carrier, or to the binaural frequency, it's ages since I made it. I did try and keep as much stuff as possible synced together, although some artistic license is employed, sure. I'd agree with you that the feel of the music would have an equal or more direct impact on your state of mind, but there are some interesting other points to consider. First, in the example above, the two carriers change frequency smoothly, producing a constantly varying binaural tone. I did other experiments with tones that stepped in value every minute or so, and although the binaural frequency would change a small amount, from like 8.4hz to 8.3hz, and this change was not always audible consciously, it certainly produced an extremely dramatic jarring sensation while getting really spaced out, like a smack in the face type jarring sensation. Another interesting thing is that if you take the same piece as above, and mix the carriers into mono, you'll get a similar audio result, but the psychological reaction is different. It's also cool to lift one of the earphone cups for a moment and listen to one channel only, and observe how the beating disappears
 Another interesting point to consider is that drumming is undeniably consciousness-changing, and that many of our favourite tempos can be seen as octaves of interesting brainwave frequencies, for instance psytrance at 140bpm is a kick drum repeating at 2.3hz, which is a bit low for brain frequencies, but the 8th notes are repeating at 4.6hz which is the deep meditation frequency of the brain. If you're into dancing to electronic music at all then I think it's no surprise that brainwave entraining has marked results interesting points. i'm curious to hear your piece when i get home.
never considered the brainwave/dance music tempo connection. i have noticed that my heartbeat seems to sync to the frequency of the kick drum when i'm dancing. not the actual phase of the pattern, but the general pulse frequency.
Recent blogs: my new USB MIDI controller
I played around with this myself a while back. Got to thinking about how to relate them to pitch and rhythm in the track but ended up finding the whole thing becoming a bit 'graph paper' and the music that came out the other side just wasnt worth shit. It did spark a few interesting pieces of sound design but I concede defeat in making anything particularly musical
One of the problems is reproduction. as 'analog' says.. headphones or a fuck off massive rig are the only real ways of relaying this shit to the listener so you're already in difficult ground. I did go to a show called 'Infrasound' held down on the south bank - link it was pretty interesting stuff. A cool experiment along the same lines as the binaural beats.. basically investigating subsonic tones etc. If i'm honest though I'd probably say they had little to no effect. Was a bit of a shame. On the other hand, the 'Hawire Sessions' night at the Egg I went to later on that same day took me to another planet ;) My music is filled with hemisync effects. This is probably the best example. The last half will definitely space you out if you concentrate on it while listening.
More is at sonic-union.com/dsp. Almost everything I do is based on a psychoacoustical effect of some sort.
Recent blogs: Vintage Soviet Electronics, New DSP Video
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