I think its important to remember that tone and rhythm are essentially the same concepts at different scales. It is also important to know that people can indeed interpret poly-rhythms and harmonies just fine.
If this were true, music wouldn’t work the way it does, and would have a hugely different core identity.
Also, the summation of “two sounds from the same source” would usually be interpreted as one being the carrier, and the other being the modulation. This is the fundamentals of AM, FM, PM, and other forms of passband modulation.
When you hear music, you hear every single frequency, all the harmonics. Sounds that we hear can be thought of as the sum of many sine waves. I am sure folks might argue about the dirichlet conditions being met/not met, but really in basic terms this is generally true. Any signal (not necessarily audio) can be broken down into a series of sine waves that represent constituent frequencies. That’s called Fourier analysis. Think of the resultant signal as a smoothie, and Fourier analysis as a means to use a filter to get the ingredients used in that smoothie. In synth terms, this idea is what additive synthesis is all about, but executed in reverse.
So the “two sounds” are perceived as one sound. The human brain can do intense calculations to pick that apart into many separate ideas. Frequency even has two special cases, tone and rhythm. Knowing something is an octave higher (2x the frequency) just by listening to it is such an example.
It’s a funny one tbh. So you do get (especially in alpha and beta bandwidth) entrainment effects for the period that you’re listening to the binaural beat, and this can impact behaviour during tasks. So for example, boosting higher alpha bandwidth power (~15Hz) has shown to improving working memory task performance - basically tasks with an immediate memory load requirement (kind of like RAM?). So in this sense, boosting lower alpha might actually be helping you relax, as this bandwidth is associated with relaxation, though the effects will be small.
The extent to which this continues outside of the listening period is very much unclear, but I’d err on the side of saying it doesn’t. The closest I think it could do is effectively help you self-regulate brain states, though this is contentious. Basically the thinking here would be that if listening to alpha waves whilst you meditate helps you to relax (which is associated with higher low-alpha bandwidth power) you might be able to better generate you own alpha activity once you know what that feels like. I suppose this is basically the goal of meditation anyway tbh.
The last thing to consider is that these kinds of things always talk about ‘dropping’ or ‘raising’ a band, but you have to remember that your brain is oscillating at these all these frequencies all the time, between and within brain regions. What entrainment does is just synchronise a tiny fraction of them that happen to be near that frequency anyway. You’d never be able to move the activity of these oscillations to a totally different frequency, and you wouldn’t want to anyway because they oscillate at these frequencies for a reason. Experiments which have tried to do really audacious entrainment (e.g. drastically increase/decrease the beta bandwidth to better synchronise with gamma and maybe improve memory capacity) have largely failed to my knowledge
Aye that’s true - I suppose i wasn’t really thinking here, ofc they beat you can hear this all the time. I guess what I mean is they don’t produce a binaural beat effect.
I suppose the chord thing I’m just being silly and you can take with a pinch of salt - though I do kind think it’s interesting to consider what that harmonised group of frequencies would sound/feel like. You have to consider one of the weird things about the binaural phenomenon is that it does let you perceive these lower frequency tones in a weird, slightly different way - you’re not limited by your ears, because you brain is just generating the ‘tones’ itself. So whilst yeah, I don’t think it’ll just produce a chord in your head, it could have a strange experience tied to it. Especially as all the possible binaural beats have a frequency straddling that point from rhythm to a sustained note.
Tbh this could all by undone by the fact that i have no idea if you can make a binaural beat with more than one frequency at a time.
Suspiciously the 10.9 Hz binaural beat (which is in the middle of the alpha waves range !) is present between 3 combinations of the “known” frequencies.
So 316,1 Hz could be the lower one for blue and 372,6Hz the high part filling the gap with the 34,4Hz beat.
Can’t wait to listen to that with 8 speakers.
All right, i fixed activespeaker Nr.8 and also removed and bypassed the volume control. Will use the pots and knobs elsewhere.
Has anyone used a TCA730A in a module? It’s a vintage stereo volume/ balance chip.
After a number of obstacles (e.g. making the laptop talk to the audio interface ) the experimental setup is now up and running. The real thing feels more trippy, but I’m surprised how well the phone captures the effect. Once the volumes are finetuned you hear different beat frequencies and some doppler effects when you move around. 316.1Hz for low blue fits in well. I tried different values for high blue and liked 437.8 best.
The speaker setup is 8x8m in the attic of our barn, please ignore all the trash.
Hahaha-I know what you mean-it’s that “Blair Witch-but-with-good-lighting” effect. This mill is going to be amazing when it’s complete-just please, PLEASE be careful walking around with the unfinished floor like that @TrapaNatans!
Following that idea I made an excel sheet to find beats for the “unknown” blue frequencies. In the video they are set to 316,1Hz and 437,8Hz resulting in B (30,8Hz) and the sub- (sub) contra F (10.9Hz).
I will play around with that setup some more, it is really fascinating.
By accident I just found this piece of paper. The 2 missing (pink! ) frequencies are 392,4Hz and 261,6 Hz. Someone understands the deeper meaning of the score?
Every voice or instrument uses a combination of these pitches to be 'unique‘. (Radical over simplification)
If you play a C on a piano two below middle C the reason you recognize it as a piano are the 13 other notes that resonate with it, some are constructive and others clash but all make it a piano. Put them all together to get ‘noise’.
My apologies to any physicists or acoustic boffins, it’s over 35 years since I had to study this. In fact, we have physicists on this forum…get in here!
@jotaparra ,this is the piece from Benedict Mason I talked about. I’m sure there is some deeper meaning behind these 8 frequencies and the notes that were played by the musicians other than this brief descriptions.
) the experimental setup is now up and running. The real thing feels more trippy, but I’m surprised how well the phone captures the effect. Once the volumes are finetuned you hear different beat frequencies and some doppler effects when you move around. 316.1Hz for low blue fits in well. I tried different values for high blue and liked 437.8 best.
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) frequencies are 392,4Hz and 261,6 Hz. Someone understands the deeper meaning of the score?
