Lately I’ve been working with *the brainwave generator*, a very user-friendly and robust program that allows you to manipulate binaural beat frequencies. (It is one of the resources given in the links page of this site.) The trial download is free, and although you don’t get access to the full library without payment, you can customize for yourself quite easily and it is fully functional in this respect.
Binaural beats utilize the frequency following effect to manipulate brainwaves (commonly referred to delta, theta, alpha and beta) to the frequency corresponding to the ‘beats’ of the tone you’re listening to. By doing so, you can increase (or decrease) relaxation, sleep, or attention and even more esoteric phenomena related to consciousness (e.g., oobe). A good faq is given here, and there’s a lot of other information available elsewhere, so I won’t belabor the issue…
Some personal experimentation will be desired, but there are lots of resources available that correlate specific brainwave frequencies with various states of consciousness. This list provides quite a few diverse and interesting potential effects…
I used to experiment with this program quite a bit, but recently took it up for one simple purpose: to increase states of meditation and relaxation when desired. I’ve found that a 2-minute oscillating beat between 1.5 and 4 hz, with a secondary tone at 10 hz is *extremely* effective…
