Forums IMPORTANT: PLEASE READ Beyond Human Binaural Beats, EEG, etc.

I have been reading the rather lively Centerpointe thread and thought to start a slightly different but similar discussion.

I have been experimenting with binaural beats for over 25 years. I've made electronic tone generators and wrote lots of software to generate tones.

The tones work. Binaural beats work. Robert Monroe likened them to training wheels though. People I know who are adept at triggering their own altered states agree. You don't need the tones.

Monaural beats work also. One of the interesting things is that when people played binaural beat cassette tapes on "boom-boxes" the audience still got some effects. Dick Sutphen (hypnotist) uses a monaural (AM) beat quite effectively in his home study tapes.

Anna Wise has spent many years characterizing "localized" consiousness. One of the things she points out is that the brain produces multiple frequencies simulataneously. When the brain is firing on all cylinders you get a pattern she calls the awakened mind - beta, alpha, theta and delta occurring simultaneously.

Typically theta and delta are low amplitude and need to be encouraged. That's where the tones come in. Boost.

EEG does not seem to be very useful in charaterizing non-local consciousness (out of body, remote viewing, etc.)

Entrainment is a sorta slow process requiring minutes. If you sit and listen to nice spacy music or even silence then you'll get some of the same effects. If you listen to monaural or binaural beats you'll get some of the same effects.

Remember it is you doing it, not the tones or the tapes (think training wheels). You are the canvas the picture is painted on.

After you get to playing around with this stuff for a while you gain respect for those people who put a heck-of-a-lot of time in weeding out the non-productive combinations. Pretty soon buying their products becomes supporting their work.

could you briefly describe what that "weeding out" process involves. do you begin by testing certain frequency combinations just on yourself, or do you have a group of test subjects to work with?

By the way, thank you for your effort. What do you think of the Awakened Minds CD?

Weeding out is simply eliminating those tone combinations which don't have a whole lot of effect for me or that I don't like. For me it is almost all subjective.

Weeding out might better have been expressed as "tuning in." I sweep the carrier frequency until I feel something, then expand the beat frequency. Add another beat pair and keep going until it feels full.

I usually strive to utilize the western musical scale as a basis for things. A=440 doesn't drive musicians with perfect pitch nuts. 100 or 200 Hz don't fit into the diatonic system yet some mind travel systems use those frequency increments.

so are you saying its possible to produce a "diatonic" version of the AwakenedMinds CD? what would be the lowest delta frequency?
and by the way, do you know their formula
(all the frequencies on the CD)?

Anything is possible <grin>.

I have not heard any of the material from the folks at the website awakenedminds.com but from scoping out their site they are right on with the techniques.

The Awakened Mind I was referring to came from Anna Wise, a brain researcher and very nice lady. It is a pattern that you can find in her book, "The High Performance Mind" which has relative amplitudes and frequency information in it.

Exact frequency content of people's copyrighted combinations is not legally possible to divulge without them getting ****ed off. Hemi-sync is copyrighted but binaural beats are not.

Fourier transforms, joint time-frequency analysis, wavelet analysis all make reverse engineering a piece of cake these days. But why would you want to do what others have done? Why not break new ground? Discover new combinations? They discovered their patterns by tuning the dial.

As for an awakened mind pattern it is something like this ...

140 (1.5), 210 (2.0), 280 (6), 350 (6.5), 420 (11), 490 (11.5), 560 (21)

where the first number is the "carrier" and the parenthetical number is the "beat frequency" so that 200 (2) would be 199 Hz in one ear and 201 Hz in the other ear.

Chordally (diatonically) it might be something like ...

110 (2), 220 (1.5), 330 (4), 440 (4.6), 523 (6.5)

which makes an A minor chord that reinforces the delta and theta areas.

The problem is how to get the higher beta difference frequencies in a consonant pleasing way instead of sounding like geese farts. Delta and theta is easy but just try and find a place for the 30 Hz beta.

In response to your specific question about how low to go with the delta frequency, sub-hertz is acceptable. Indeed less than 2 Hz beat frequency gives some nice swirling stuff, very pleasant.

Low frequency carriers, like people talk about with Centerpointe is another thing entirely. The frequencies must be able to be reproduced by the headphones in order to be heard. The lower the carriers, the better the headphones needed to reproduce it.

I wonder if some of the "no-effect" responses from Centerpointe is due to using inadequate headphones?

quote:

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Originally posted by AlanHilton:

I wonder if some of the "no-effect" responses from Centerpointe is due to using inadequate headphones?

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Yeah, I have thought the same thing, since the carrier frequency principle doesn't work in mono. I have a hard time believing that anyone could listen to a 0.3 Hz beat at a 50 Hz carrier frequency for more than 5 minutes without "feeling anything". I avoid daring people to do this though (i.e. during those "does Centerpointe work" threads), because I am afraid they could mess themselves up if they play with carrierfrequencies that are too low.

Good info BTW, thanks...

[This message has been edited by garics (edited December 13, 2004).]

[This message has been edited by garics (edited December 13, 2004).]

In monaural you would not get the binaural effect but you would get a frequency following response and entrainment. Much of the early research on FFR was done on cats using clicks. If the signals (typically sine waves) are combined into a single channel they have constructive and destructive interference and hence amplitude modulate.

Hearing phenomena occur in bands of frequencies and the use of low (50 Hz) carrier frequencies will give a different effect than higher (150 or 300 Hz) frequencies.

For example I tried your suggestion and set up 50 (0.3) but did not perceive the same effect as 150 (0.3). At 150 (0.3) I sensed the sound source moving "swirling" but at 50 (0.3) there was no sensation of movement. The sound source seemed static with a 50 Hz carrier. 72 Hz carrier was pretty neat.

I've done a lot of "tuning the dial" and found that the preception of consonance and disonance, single sound source, grating, etc. varies depending on carrier frequency and it is not a straight linear progression although higher carriers seem to support higher beat frequencies without sounding grating.

It tend to cycle so that 260 Hz will support a higher beat frequency than 310 Hz. I have only my perceptual data and have not done a large sample. Great research topic. Very time consuming.

As far as folks freaking out ... some people have a flare for the dramatic. I have never encountered any combination that caused me to freak out. There are some more pleasant and less pleasant combinations, more powerful combinations and less powerful combinations. There are combinations that "take me places" and combinations that help me "be present" and focus on mental tasks.

The tones merely accentuate what's there or help to encourage it if it is absent. They are "training wheels." The effects fade after you stop listening to them. There are days where I am more susceptable to entrainment and other days where I don't get much effect.

Fscinating stuff!

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Originally posted by AlanHilton:

For example I tried your suggestion and set up 50 (0.3) but did not perceive the same effect as 150 (0.3).

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The combination that supposedly caused Bill and his friends to "freak out" was Purification Level 3, I think the carrier on that one is about 80 HZ. I'm estimating. 50 (.3) is a lot lower than that and is like starting the Centerpointe Program at Flowering Level 3, which is the next to last level.

Anyway, I would try it again for about 15 minutes if you are curious. It is not necessarily going to have the "aesthetic" or pleasing effect you are in the habit of researching with other frequency combinations. But it is guaranteed to have an effect, unless you are just flat-out unresponsive to that kind of technology. And maybe some people are, I don't know.

(When I go "frequency diving" I usually feel euphoric for a couple of days, and then somewhat disoriented thereafter.)

For a novice, where would one go looking for tone generators, the average price of such things and all the gear you would need to produce the results you have mentioned?

http://www.bwgen.com

Free to download the software, $40 to register after a 1-month trial