Create and listen to monaural and binaural beats from within a comfort of your own browser using this widget. You can use your computer keyboard for quicker adjustments or your mouse to drag sliders and press buttons. You have full control over this widget and don’t need any special equipment. The interface allow you to experiment with various types of beat and frequencies.
First things first: Put on your headphones. To ensure that both your left and right channel are working properly, tap the headphone check button; it’ll play a quick burst of tone in each ear. Because the sound effect rely on difference between what’s coming through each ear, this part is key. Did the headphone check not work? Swap the earpieces (or inspect your cable) before proceeding.
How to Use the Brain Wave Widget
Start by pressing the Start tones button or hitting space bar on your keyboard. The two main controls is the beat rate and the carrier frequency. The default is a 200Hz carrier pitch. Use the slider to change it, or hit left and right arrow keys on your keyboard. If you hold down shift key as well then you’ll increase/decrease by bigger steps (of 10 Hz).
How fast that pulsing sound is delivered are controlled by the beat control. Each rate of beat correspond to a different mental state. To change the beat, use the up and down arrow keys (or their slider). For more fine-tuned adjustments, hold shift then press one of the arrow key. You’ll go up/down in increments of 0.1 Hz. The range goes from 0.5 Hz (deep relaxation) to 30 Hz (focused attention).
The ability to compare binaural and monaural audio are another cool feature: In the former case, the two tones will remain distinct in each of your ears. You’ll only experience the beat in your head. In the latter (monaural), the tones is mixed physically, resulting in the beat happening out in the air. Tap the b key on your keyboard, or use the mode buttons to toggle back-and-forth. Alternatively, the A/B swap feature automaticly switches between the two after six seconds, a nice way to see how you see it.
The drone layer is added as a low, steady grounding tone. The noise brings in an ambient texture of rain, ocean or just pink noise. With the ocean noise you also get a slow swell effect modulating the filter and the volume. These are all toggled by pressing the d key for drone and n key for noise on your keyboard. There’s a volume slider for each of the layers so you can balance them how you like. To switch the drone and noise layers on/off you could of use the n and d keys on your keyboard.
The app feature a session builder and timer for when you’re listening for longer periods of time. The timer will play the audio for however many minutes you choose. The session builder will gradually ramp up a beat frequency to another during a set period of time. For example, you might want to start in a calm state and move into an alert state, or vice versa. There’s also a progress track so you can see how much time remains.
One of its most useful feature is the ladder. Here it starts on a low beat frequency and then slowly steps up to find out where your personal hearing limit are. As it goes up in steps, you say yes if you can still hear the individual beats, or no if they have blended into a rough, textured sound. No right/wrong answer here, just an interesting insight into how your brain experiences various frequency.
The other feature is called the carrier sweep. This starts with one pitch as a base and then very gradually alters this base, so that you hear what the same beat sounds like higher up.
There are five quick preset frequency buttons at the bottom to jump directly to most commonly used gamma, beta, alpha, theta and delta wave levels. Just press the corresponding number keys (one to five) to access them immediately as well.
Soloing either ear is available via the monitor buttons so you can check they’re not the same frequency. That changes back to both channels in eight seconds.
Keep the volume at a comfortabley level. While the audio plays, you should be able to hear somebody speak in the same room. Stop the audio if you feel dizzy, uncomfortable, or if you begin to hear ringing. Don’t use it while driving or when needing your full attention elsewhere. Have some fun with the controls, and discover what works best for you.