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Binaural Beats: The magical music of the brain (Visit this link)
Interesting Thing of the Day on Binaurral Beats:If you were to listen to two musical instruments playing the same note, but slightly out of tune with each other, you may perceive a sort of warbling or vibrato effect. These cyclic pulsations are called beats, and within a small range of tunings, they get faster the farther apart the two notes are. (If the instruments are perfectly in tune, the effect is absent, and if they’re really far out of tune, then you simply hear two different notes.) It turns out that you can get exactly the same effect if you play a tone in one ear and a very slightly lower- or higher-pitched tone in the other ear. Listen to either sound individually, and it sounds normal-but listen to both together and you perceive the beats. In other words, this effect is not an acoustic one, but is produced by the brain. The human auditory apparatus can hear sounds with a pitch as low as about 20Hz (Hertz = cycles per second), give or take a few Hertz. However, the frequency of brainwaves-particularly those associated with states of relaxation and sleep-can go much lower, even below 1Hz. So a recording of a sound at, say, 4Hz would be inaudible and would have no effect. However, if you pitch two sounds exactly 4Hz apart (say, one at 100Hz and the other at 104Hz) and play one in each ear, the brain “manufactures” a 4Hz beat.
... brain will then strongly tend to fall into sync with that frequency, producing the same sort of subjective sensation as sleep. Conveniently, the range of frequency differences that can produce an audible beat corresponds roughly to the range of frequencies dominant in the brain during the sorts of relaxed states most of us enjoy. Mixed Notes Of course, plain out-of-tune tones aren’t especially interesting to listen to, so most publishers of binaural beat CDs mix in other sounds such as rain, waterfalls, bells, gongs, and so on. In some cases, these extra sounds completely hide the beats so that the listener is unaware of them consciously, but they still register in the brain and have the same effect
