Wouldn’t it be great if we could use “sounds” to make us feel the way we want to feel? It would be sort of like tuning a radio. If we could feel more calm or focused by putting on a pair of headphones, we MAY well be able to supplement or even replace medication or traditional therapy.
There is a lot of evidence to support the theory that our thought processes, what is going on in our minds at any given time, determine not only our moods, but our personalities and behavior as well. Most people would agree that our thought processes are largely governed by how each of us sees the world. Our “world models” are made up of a large combination of experiences and beliefs, which in turn are influenced by how we experience the world. A huge part of that experience comes from the data our senses take in, what we see, hear, feel, smell and taste.
Breaking things down a bit more, it could be said that the sounds we hear strongly influence our world models, and by that, our personalities, mood and behavior.
It turns out that now it IS possible to use audio to direct our brains toward just about any mood or emotion we want. This isn’t about hypnosis inductions or affirmations, but something called “binaural beats” listened to through headphones. Our brainwave frequencies are known to be associated with certain states of mind. For example, alpha waves (8-14 cycles-per-second, or “hertz”) are associated with relaxation; beta waves (14-30 hertz) correlate with focus and alertness, etc.
Now if we listen to two different sine-wave tones, one in each ear, our brains (not our ears) hear the mathematical difference between the two. For instance, if a 200 hertz sine wave is playing on one side, and a 210 hertz tone is playing on the other, your brain will “hear” a rhythm of 10 hertz. This rhythm is referred to as “binaural beats.” Now when your brain listens to binaural beats at a specific frequency, its brainwaves tend to synchronize to the same frequency. So listening to alpha binauaral beats (say, 10 beats per second) will tend to cause your brainwaves to play along at the same frequency. So since brainwaves in the alpha range are associated with relaxation, that means listening to alpha bianaural beats will tend to make you relax. How cool is that? The same is true for the effects of beats in the other zones.
Now before you rush out and buy CDs or mp3s of binaural programs, you should realize something important. You need to listen to these programs in headphones! If you just play them on speakers, the two separate tones needed to cause your brain to hear binaural beats won’t be separate any more. No binaural beats, no synchronization of brainwaves. I once sat in a medical waiting room that was playing some music over their room speakers very quietly. The receptionist slyly told me the music was “subliminal,” and would cause the people in the waiting room to relax. I picked up the CD case and saw that it was music encoded with alpha binaural beats. But it wasn’t going to work any better than any “regular” music in the relaxation department. The receptionist was a bit disappointed when I showed him the text on the CD case saying the effect would only work if listened to over the headphones. This is important for you to know if you want to explore the effects of the binaural beats.
Speaking of which, you can start exploring right now! You can find binaural programs ready for download here.
If you would like to learn how to create your own binaural beats using your own computer, visit Home Brew Audio on the web, or do a search for “Binaural Brainwave Entrainment.”
Good luck!
The Pros and Cons of the $5 Home PC Recording Studio
Most people don’t know that they can get started recording audio with a budget as small as $5.00. The only reason I don’t say zero dollars is that if you don’t have a microphone, you’ll need to buy one. A plastic PC mic will even suffice at this point. Now, those folks with experience recording audio from home will likely take issue with what I just said, so for them allow me to clarify. I recommend the cheapest recording set-up for beginners because they can still learn most of the basics they’ll ever need to know with that gear. Also, by learning the limitations of their current set-up, they will be better informed as to what else they need to get to the next level. I do not propose that the lowest budget recording studio will allow the most stunning audio ever. But most folks, even you experts out there, would be surprised at how good the audio produced from a “low-end” studio can be!The Pros of a $5.00 PC Recording Studio
So what are the “pros” of a $5.00 home recording studio? Let’s take a look at the top three:
- Cost: According to the US Census Bureau as long ago as 2003, “The majority of households have personal computers and Internet access. In 2003, 70 million American households, or 62 percent, had one or more computers, up from 56 percent in 2001.” More recent estimates put that percentage closer to 70 percent. That means that if they wanted to, 7 out of every 10 people in the US could start a home recording studio in the next hour.
- Capability: In 2013, the availability of open source audio software and the average quality of consumer computers make it possible to do: multi-track” (recording one sound, then recording another on top of the first as you listen, etc.) recording at this budget level. Editing and mixing tools in the software make it possible to pan sounds left and right, equalize and otherwise treat or fix audio problems, and mix down to a stereo master file. That was pretty-much unheard of 10 years ago.
- Affordable Upgrading: If you walked into a music store today and told a salesman you wanted to start a home studio, he’d try to talk you into spending several hundred (or even thousands of) dollars. You’d have some pretty nice gear, but odds are that you won’t need a majority of that gear to do what you need to do. You’ll also be totally overwhelmed by the knowledge needed to operate all this gear. The $5.00 studio is easy to learn, and allows you to incrementally add gear and/or software in order to achieve exactly the quality you need. That will save you time, frustration, and money in the long run.
The Cons of a $5.00 PC Recording Studio
- Noise: At the lowest budget, sound is recorded through a very small microphone going directly into a factory sound card on an “average” computer. You’ll have noticed that there is a lot of buzzing, humming and hissing noise when you record with this equipment. There are things you can do to minimize noise, such as keeping the mic wire as far from plugs or other power sources as possible. You can also treat the noise after it’s recorded. But at the end of the day, the physical limitations in the amplifiers in “regular” sound cards, and construction of the $5.00 PC mics will mean a fair amount of noise is inevitable.
- Capability: There are things you simply cannot do at the lowest budget level, such as use make use of MIDI, virtual instruments, record more than one track at a time, etc.
- Ease of use: The $5.00 budget studio doesn’t have room in the budget for things like microphone stands, patch bays, cables, etc. It can be pretty slow-going trying to set the PC mic up to capture piano or guitar without a little more effort than many folks find feasible. Also, the cables for these mics tend to be pretty short, again making it difficult logistically to record.
Those are the major pros and cons of starting your home studio with the “zero-to-five-dollar” budget. The great thing about that budget level, though, is that you have little-to-nothing to lose and everything to gain. Once you get comfortable with the limitations, you can address them one-by-one, incrementally improving your set-up according to your own needs. Chances are good that if all you need to do is record your voice for podcasts, or video narration, you can get the quality you need by spending as little as $25 extra dollars for a USB microphone. Whatever your ultimate needs are, you really can’t go wrong starting at the lowest budget and working your way up.
Learn to record and produce professional-sounding audio from home without spending a dime for gear. Fun and short video tutorials show you how. We’ll show you how to start with a $0-$5 budget, and then how to improve your studio for a few dollars at a time as your knowledge and confidence increase.
See you around campus!
What is Digital Audio and Why Should I Care?
What is digital audio?
Wow, that’s a question that you’ll find answered all over the internet. And you might actually be able to understand some of them. It is almost an irrelevant question in this day and age, because it is the rare person who can even FIND analog (the opposite of digital) recording gear anymore…at least stuff you can afford on a really tight budget. If you want to start recording right now, for a budget of $5.00 or less, then you’ll be recording on computer, which means you’ll be creating digital audio.
OK, so I kind of hinted that I’d explain what digital audio was so that regular people can understand it, so I hope this will do the trick. If the audio is in a computer, it’s digital.
See? Was that so hard? Now you’re asking what I meant earlier when I said that “analog” is the opposite of “digital.” OK, how’s this? If the audio is on something physical like tape or on a record (those are the black, round, flat things your parents used to listen to music on) it’s analog.
Now there are some trouble-makers out there…I see you in the back! You want to get all picky and point out that “lots of audio outside the computer is still digital,” and just because it’s on tape, the audio could be digital.” The trouble-makers aren’t wrong, folks.
But ignore that! Yeah, forget about the fact that audio on phones and iPods is digital also. The smart ones out there knew that those things are just little computers anyway, right? And it won’t affect many of you to know that some digital media can be recorded to tape. But guess why you don’t need to remember that? Because if it’s digital tape, IT WILL SAY SO. It is rare enough that it will have a label saying something like DAT (digital audio tape) or something similar with the word “digital” in it.
So now you know the difference, right? Digital audio is “computerized” audio, and analog audio is recorded in some physical way onto records (all those little grooves) or tape (all those little magnetic particles).
Why should you care if you are going to be recording audio on your computer anyway? It’s digital right? Well…yes and no.
Getting Audio Into A Computer
It WILL be digital once it’s in the computer. But when it’s just a voice coming out of your face, it’s still analog. The physical medium is the air molecules your voice is moving. In order to make it digital, there has to be a machine that converts analog audio to digital audio. Amazingly enough, these are called “analog-to-digital” (A-to-D) converters. The converters play a large role in how good the audio sounds. If you’re just using the ones on the garden-variety sound card, the audio probably won’t be “high-end.” Audio interface boxes (mainly USB these days) typically have much better A-to-D converters.
One good example (and not just because I use one :-)) is the Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 or Focusrite Solo.
These interface units are actually doing two main jobs – conversion, as I just discusses a bit (no pun intended :-)), and amplification (mic preamps). In the old days you’d have two units for this – a converter and a preamplifier. But mostly these days (updating this in 2018) these interface units combine many functions, including A-D conversion, D-A conversion, and preamplifiers.
So now you understand the difference between digital and analog audio. Go forth and use your knew knowledge well!
Do You Know What EQ Is? The Killer Sound Edit
How many times have you seen the term “EQ” on your car radio or CD player, or your home entertainment system? If you are just learning audio production, no doubt you’ve been bombarded with references to different kinds of EQ (parametric, dynamic, etc.). But has anyone ever just broken it down for you in terms anyone could understand? Let me see if I can do that for you in this article.Some people just take in information better if it is explained with very few technical terms, regardless of education or intellect. Heck, I have a bachelor of science degree and a masters degree, and I still hate reading overly-technical descriptions. So in that spirit, let’s talk about something that is bafflingly called “equalization,” or “EQ” for short. See, the name itself is not very descriptive, I don’t think. Here is what it really is. Ready for this?
EQ is turning volume up or down. That’s pretty-much it. Too broad? OK, let me add one more thing. EQ is turning volumes up or down on bass and/or treble knobs. I happily use those last two terms because you’ve seen them on your car stereos all your life, so I am making an assumption you’ve played with them and kinda know the difference between bass and treble.
Wasn’t that an informative article? Oh, you need a bit more? Ah, you’d like to know why it’s useful, or at least why you should care. Oh, alright; if you insist. Let’s take probably the easiest example I can think of…your car stereo. The most basic EQ controls are bass and treble. If you’re listening to hip-hop, you may enjoy turning the bass knob (or slider) up because it will make the kick drum and bass synth or guitar much boomier. You can actually feel that bass now. On the other hand, let’s say you just want to listen to a basketball game on the radio. If your bass is turned up, the voice may sound muddy and hard to understand. Turn the bass back down and maybe bump the treble up a little bit. Bingo, you can now hear the voice much better. It will be more clear and easier to understand.
Are you getting the idea? Sometimes people turn both the bass and treble knobs all the way up. Well, this didn’t really accomplish anything except to do exactly what turning the “volume” knob up would have done! Now are you getting it? The difference between the main volume control and the EQ control is that the EQ adjusts ONLY the bass or the treble independently, while the volume turns EVERYTHING (bass and treble) up or down.
Now I sense you can handle a new term…”frequency.” When we say bass, we mean the sounds in the low frequencies of a song. Treble means the higher frequencies. More sophisticated EQs allow you to control more than just the bass and treble, adding a few more frequencies between the two, like “middle” or “low-middle” and “high-middle“. Obviously this gives you more control over what parts of the sound you turn up or down.
There is quite a lot to learn about EQ and frequencies. But for now, take this useful lesson: if you want to impress your friends with what an audio-geek you are, never turn all the EQ knobs or sliders all the way up or down at the same time, or else all you’ve done is turn the master volume up or down. Try turning one up and one down to see how that sounds. Or try moving just one control up or down and leaving the other one alone. That will make you seem much cooler;).
Binaural Brainwave Entrainment
If you want to change your state of mind in about 20 minutes, all you need is a pair of headphones!
Did you know that just by playing two different (as in not the same note) steady tones, one in each ear, you can change the rhythms of your own brainwaves? “And why would I want to do that?” you may ask. Well let me finish;). Did you know that certain brainwave rhythms, or frequencies, are associated with certain states-of-mind? Ahhh, now I see a spark of understanding starting to flicker in your eyes. YES! Wouldn’t it be wonderful…almost magical…if we could change our states-of-mind in less than 10 minutes by putting headphones on and picking a mood? Why, it sounds almost “Matrix”-like. Welcome to the reality of binaural brainwave entrainment! I know, the term doesn’t exactly trip lightly off the tongue, but it was coined by the neuro-scientists who discovered it. It’s a fancy way of saying “syncing your brain to a beat.”
It doesn’t work if you just pound on your skull with your fist, or listen to rap music, though. The beats needed for this to work have to be set up between your ears. Stay with me for just a bit longer and let me try to explain. If there is a musical note steadily sounding, and then someone starts playing a SECOND note that is just slightly different in tune, you’ll hear a sort of rhythmic “thrumming” sound. Guitar players know this “thrumming,” beating sound very well. It’s one way they can tune their guitar strings. You pluck two neighboring simultaneously, one of them pressed down on, say, the 5th fret. If they are “in tune,” they will sound the same note, and a nice steady tone of both strings ringing will be heard. However, if the open string is slightly out of tune (a little higher or lower in pitch) with the fretted one, you will hear beats. Even if the two notes are only slightly different. That’s how a guitar player knows the strings are out of tune. He then slowly tunes one of the strings until the beats get slower…slower…and eventually go away completely, which is what happens when the two notes are the same.
The interesting thing about this is that the beats are kind of an illusion. If the rhythm of these beats is, say, 10 beats per second, it isn’t because either one of the notes have a rhythm of 10 beats per second! Huh? I know! Freaky-deaky isn’t it? It’s the combination of these two notes that causes our brains to sense thrumming instead of a steady tone. If you ever took wave-mechanics in school, THAT is what we’re talking about. Sound is made of waves in the air. Two slightly different waves in the air will crash into each other, messing with both waves, until the result is something totally different from either original wave. The resulting rhythmic thrumming is known as “binaural beats.”
So like I said, not just any rhythm will work for the mind-altering (ooo THAT sounds fun:)) mojo that IS brainwave entrainment. It’s got to come from binaural beats, which your brain will best “hear” if the two tones needed are played in headphones, one in each ear.
So where in the world do you get such tones? Well, you could make them yourself on your computer (learn how at http://www.homebrewaudio.com). But wouldn’t it be better to get them from folks who have been studying and creating programs for EXACTLY this reason for 20 years?
Yeah, I thought so too. I got my first Brainwave Sync tape (yeah…I said TAPE) back in the early 90s, and have relied on them for stress-relief, meditation, relaxation, focus, concentration, and just plain “shuttin’ out the world.”
They are still going strong! Click Here! to go to their site and browse around.
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-Tinnitus Cure
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