If you’re skeptical about the effects of binaural beats, aka “digital drungs”, which some believe can be used to entrain your mind into specific states, this is a free way to try it out for yourself.

If you try out AmbieSounds+, leave a comment with your thoughts!

Description:

AmbiSounds+ will help you fall asleep faster, help you relax and even help you get your work done by eliminating noise/annoyance in the environment. The application is an atmosphere enhancer that will help you create an ambient environment of your liking. With abilities to layer multiple tracks, your environment possibilities are virtually endless.

FEATURES – HIGH QUALITY BINAURAL sound tracks – Combine as many tracks as you like to create your custom layered track – Find yourself listening to your favorite tracks over and over? No problem. To make it easier, AmbiSounds is the only application of its kind to feature track ‘FAVORITES’ to make it faster for you to listen to your track – CONVENIENT options to configure your track playback on the front playback screen – Settable TIMER with playback stop or playback fade out – Option to automatically EXIT the application when timer expires – Auto saving settings – More than 20 tracks – Ability to select tracks from multiple categories for simultaneous playback – Configurable ‘Favorites’ track listing *** SAMPLE TRACKS(These are only a subset of the 80+ tracks in the application) *** – Bird Song – Church Bells – Frogs – Light Rain – Thunderstorm – Spanish Banks – Mountain Stream – Pendulum – Ocean Waves – Waterfall + many more! **

RECOMMENDATIONS OF USE** It is recommended that the tracks should be listened to using a headphone in order to maximize the binaural sound effects. However, headphones are not mandatory to listen to the high quality tracks that are part of this application. ** Requirement ** iPhone OS 2.2 *** Bugs/Improvements/Feedback *** Please feel free to provide feedback or suggest improvements and bugs that you may encounter. Simply contact me via email at vikas.singla.7@gmail.com.

On a recent post on binary beats, didjeridoo player Tom Lange writes:

I’m exploring binaural beats myself, hoping to incorporate them with my music. Starting as an acoustic musician I’m facing a steep learning curve but I’d love to get a small midi keyboard and Gnaural or something like that to produce the beats and mix it all in with my didjeridus and gongs and such.

Any recommendations for an electronic music newbie? Programs or keyboards? Got a Mac, Mbox2 with protools le and a bit of garage band experience.

Tom’s interested in incorporating binaural beats into his Sonic Massage, but he’s an electronic music newbie.

What do you think the best way for him to expand into electronic sounds would be, especially if he wants to experiment with binaural beats?

Impress me, guys!

Binaural beats are illusory “beats” that you can hear when pure tones of slightly different frequency are separately and simultaneously presented to each ear.

It’s an interesting psychoacoustic effect – one that at least some people think can help you do things ranging from concentrating to opening your chakras. Mainstream media has picked up on this so-called “digital drug”, though, and is offering hysterical coverage that recalls the days of Reefer Madness.

Binaural Beats is a free download.

Description:

Binaural beats helps you concentrate, relax or fall asleep by inducing the brain to perceive different brainwave states such as: beta, alpha, theta, delta.

Combining with different nature sounds, you can make your own themes for many purposes such as: Sleep induction, study aid or headache treatment etc. Blocking noise from the outside world, no more distraction!

Features:

• Free combination of binaural beats, background noise and ambient noise to customize your own theme.
• Separately configure the volume of all 3 sound layers. 
• Interval (loop) setting for ambient noise. 
• 6 pieces of high quality stereo background noises and 16 ambient noises. 
• Set ambient noises as loop sound like raining or occasional sounds like thunder or seagulls calling. 
• General volume control in playback window. 
• Programmable application shutdown timer. 
• Sound volume fades out at the end of timer. -
• 7 preset themes with binaural beats: 
  • Pre-sleep induction 
  • Headache killer 
  • Quick relaxation 
  • Study aid 
  • Deep meditation 
  • Memory helper 
  • Busy thinking 
• 6 Background noises: 
  • Autumn Wind 
  • Calm sea 
  • Heavy rain with thunder 
  • Hurricane 
  • Rain forest 
  • Soft tide 
• 16 Ambient Noises: Birds; Bubbles; Campfire; Chimes; Clock; Corbie; Creek; Crickets; Owl; Rain; Rain (heavy); River; Seagulls; Thunder; Waterfall; Wind in trees 
• 9 Binaural tones: Deep dreamless sleep, Dream creation, Deep meditation, Memory helper, Lullaby, Headache killer, Relaxation, Concentration, Busy thinking.

Note: 

• This application requires stereo headphones to take effect.
• It’s dangerous to use the application while driving drowsy.

How it works:

Binaural beats may influence functions of the brain besides those related to hearing. This phenomenon is called frequency following response. The concept is that if one receives a stimulus with a frequency in the range of brain waves, the predominant brain wave frequency is said to be likely to move towards the frequency of the stimulus (a process called entrainment). In addition, binaural beats have been credibly documented to relate to both spatial perception & stereo auditory recognition, and , according to the frequency following response, activation of various sites in the brain.

Mainstream media has picked up on this so-called “digital drug”, though, and is offering hysterical coverage that recalls the days of Reefer Madness. USA Today recently warned about binaural beats, saying that these “digital drugs promote drug use”.

Now Mediahead has is bringing binaural beats to the iPhone. mindFreek (App Store link) is a unique application designed to put you to a certain state of mind.

According to creator Jakub Koter:

The binaural tones i’ve included in mindFreek are unique and may produce some interesting effects.

This application focuses the following sessions:

• Astral Projection
• Crazy High
• Out-of-Body Experience
• 3rd Eye Float
• Weightless

You may start feeling heavy, or like your arms are really heavy, like your floating or even may see things that aren’t there.

mindFreek retails for $1.99.

I’ve been checking out Crazy High while writing this post and, somehow, I remained fairly lucid. If there are any other iPhone Mind Freeks out there, let me know what you think of this app in the comments!

Background (from Jakub Koter):

Let me give you an example of a binaural beat/tone. Right ear is given a steady tone of 400Hz and the left one is given 410Hz, these tones combine in your brain to achieve a 10hz difference. This 10Hz tone is formed by your brain. This can only be achieved when using stereo headphones since the right and left channels do not mix until in your brain.

There are four frequency stages: Delta (0.5Hz-5hz), Theta (4Hz-8Hz), Alpha (8Hz-14Hz), Beta (14Hz-30Hz

For example: Theta stage (4hz-7Hz) has been found to increase learning abilities. Children spend more time in theta stage than adults, which could explain their accelerated learning capabilities.

NOTE: You must wear stereo headphones in order for this application to have any affect. Although binaural waves are considered safe, Koter says to “use at your own risk.” That probably got him an extra thousand downloads!

When two tones at slightly different frequencies are presented separately to your ears via headphones, the brain produces a phenomenon resulting in low-frequency pulsations in the loudness of a perceived sound. A beating tone will be perceived, as if the two tones mixed naturally.

According to some research, binaural beats emphasize different neural pathways and highlight different parameters of the sound stimulus than do other sounds.

I Dose has free streams of tracks designed to create binaural beats.

There are a few examples at the site.

I tried these and can’t say that my chakras got opened. Let me know what you think about this strange psychoacoustic phenomenon!

via presurfer

Gnaural is a multi-platform programmable binaural-beat generator, implementing the principle of binaural beats as described in the October 1973 Scientific American article Auditory Beats in the Brain (Gerald Oster).

It can be used to synthesize sounds that affect the brain. Here’s a demo. It should be listened to using headphones:

The central theme of Oster’s article is that processing of auditory binaural beats within the brain bears distinct differences from that done for normal sound, emphasizing different neural pathways and highlighting different parameters of the sound stimulus.

Oster’s observations inspired a wave of research in to the ways in which binaural beats could affect the brain. One area of research explored how binaural beats could evoke a “frequency-following response” (also known as “brainwave entrainment”) in EEG measures. My personal interest in binaural beats has centered almost exclusively around exploring this entrainment potential as a means of facilitating meditative states. However, Gnaural was designed to be neutral with regard to any hypothesis or application, relying strictly on the fundamental findings as described in Oster’s 1973 overview.

Gnaural is an open source project. Versions are currently available for Windows & Linux, but not yet for Mac OS X.

A limited brower-based version of Gnaural is available. A Mac developer is needed to help port this to OS X.

What are auditory binaural beats?

In 1839, German experimenter Heinrich Wilhelm Dove discovered that illusory “beats” are perceived when pure tones of slightly different frequency are separately and simultaneously presented to each ear. Dove’s insight was to realize that since there is no acoustic mixing of the tones, the perceived beats must exist soley within the auditory system, specifically that part which processes binaural (e.g., “stereo”) sound.

While research in to binaural beats continued after that, the subject was largely viewed as no more than a scientific curiosity. Oster’s paper was landmark not so much for its laboratory findings, but in how it tied-together the isolated islands of research since Dove, in a way that gave the subject a renewed relevance to modern scientific questions.

In particular, Oster viewed binaural beats as a tool with cognitive and medical applications. Cognitively, he felt it could be used to explore neural pathways, and also to address higher-level questions, including how we spatially locate sounds in our environment, and our auditory system’s propensity for selective attention (e.g., the “cocktail party effect”).

Medically, Oster saw potential for binaural beats as a diagnostic tool, both for auditory impairments, and for a broad range of non-auditory subjects. Most notable was evidence Oster showed that a decreased ability to perceive binaural beats appeared to be a pre-onset indicator of Parkinson’s disease. He also presented corroborating data correlating subtle cyclical fluctuations of estrogen in women and their ability to perceive binaural beats.

Notable for Oster’s thesis (that binaural beats are processed in ways fundamentally different from normal hearing) was the fact that binaural beats are percieved even when one of the two frequencies is below the human frequency threshold, and also when both frequencies are below the human volume threshold. This, combined with the brain data available at that time, suggested to Oster that the processing of binaural beats followed different neural pathways in the brain from other auditory processing.

Broadly, the rhythmic influencing of brainwave activity is known as “driving.” And while binaural beats have no monopoly as an auditory driving stimulus, they do have the unusual property of being able to deliver direct auditory stimuli at sub-audible frequencies (below the range of human hearing), by virtue of the heterodyning being simulated within the auditory system.

The reason this is interesting in regard to FFR is that (generally speaking) the spectrum of perceivable acoustic frequencies is well above the frequency spectrum of brainwave activity. Thus, aside from binaural beats, the only means of presenting acoustic driving stimuli is by externally modulating sound (in to waves or pulses whose periodicity falls within the spectrum of brainwave frequencies).

Binaural beats, on the other hand, provide a direct means by which pure acoustic tones can be delivered to directly produce a driving stimulus within the range of brainwave activity. Perhaps even more important (in regard to driving) is that with binaural beats, the driving stimulus arises internally (within the auditory system). This suggests that binaural beats may more effectively induce driving than simple monaural modulation, if only for the fact that the resulting stimuli arises directly within neural pathways that can be measured in the course of gauging brainwave activity.

Gnaural is officially open source, released under the GNU General Public License.