So its been like, ages since I posted anything, and darn it, its time to start again. I occasionally get an email through the contact form on the site, and since its not that frequently its quite exciting. For me anyway. Two of these are worth sharing though as they relates directly to Binaural Beats.

Psyche-Sonics

Its a project started on ideablob, which is "where entrepreneurs and small business owners can share and grow their business ideas – and have a chance to win $10,000 towards fulfilling them." With enough votes and support they can get $10k funding for their idea.

Every so often I do some Google blog searches to find what I can turn up in the world of mediation music. Well....to be more accurate I use an RSS feed from that search and add into my online reading pack, so it requires little effort from my side. Currently I finding that the blog posts are divided into a neat 80/20 split.

About 20% being something useful and relevant to music and/or meditation and 80% fake blog posts pointing to a site where you can buy a CD that will instantly convert you into a medieval meditating monk. There is also a smattering of completely non-relvant stuff where people are Google whacking to get their search ratings up.

The fake blog posts mostly lead you back to the same place, and I assume that they are making enough money selling CD's to warrant investing the time and effort into making the fake blog posts. If I had that level of commitment to simply making money, I'd probably be a lot richer by now :)

Here are few examples:

As a South African, I would request that the US education system please leave us alone!!

Perhaps the blame lies with GPS technology, which has slowly eroded our cartography skills. In the same way that spell checkers and excel have reduced our ability to spell and add. It couldn't be that some people are just, you know, stupid.

A new study on the effectiveness of binaural beats has not found any evidence of brainwave entrainment through binaural beats:

Objectives: When two auditory stimuli of different frequency are presented to each ear, binaural beats are perceived by the listener. The binaural beat frequency is equal to the difference between the frequencies applied to each ear. Our primary objective was to assess whether steady-state entrainment of electroencephalographic activity to the binaural beat occurs when exposed to a specific binaural beat frequency as has been hypothesized. Our secondary objective was to gather preliminary data on neuropsychologic and physiologic effects of binaural beat technology.

Design: A randomized, blinded, placebo-controlled crossover experiment in 4 healthy adult subjects.

Intervention: Subjects were randomized to experimental auditory stimulus of 30 minutes of binaural beat at 7 Hz (carrier frequencies: 133 Hz L; 140Hz R) with an overlay of pink noise resembling the sound of rain on one session and control stimuli of the same overlay without the binaural beat carrier frequencies on the other session.

The I-Doser store contains downloadable files for experiences like “peyote,” “marijuana,” and “nitrous,” not to mention more benign experiences like “French Roast” and mysterious items I really don’t want to know about like “masochist” and “A-bomb.”

Frankly I would love this stuff to work!! It would be more socially acceptable, easier to pass random drug tests, and if you're starting to have a bad trip, just take off the headphones. Link.

Through out my album purchasing career, I have come to realise that an album's popularity is seldom an indicator of whether I will like it or not. AC/DC's Back in Black is one that firmly breaks this particular trend. As the 5th highest selling album in the US and the 2nd highest world wide, this is clearly a popular album. This album is good enough to get 5/5 and a spot on my own personal top 10. My music taste does have a heavy rock slant and this for me is the pinnacle of rock 'n roll.

It seems there is a lot of money to be made by fooling the Google search algorithms into thinking you have site with genuine content. It gets people to your site, who then click on your ads and you make money. All very clever and clearly something Google is trying to put a stop to. I found one recently that tries to appear like a blog with a series of posts about a specific topic that people are commonly searching. I use an RSS feed that does a Google blog search for "Meditation Music", and this particular treasure of click fraud showed up:

Meditation Music to Download Free

"I believe Gardley Pilar has a predilection for buffoonery. (Wait did I spell that word right') I tend to thinkg about Meditation Music To Download Free by more common sense terms, forgiving my own instincts at times. Rumbolt Dark from the other popular site believes this as well, so I'm not alone on this one. The items in question were purchased abroad and imported to this country, where they were then processed at a Meditation Music To Download Free general warehouse.

The MentalFloss blog has an awesome article titled Sonification: A Little Data Music:

Sonification is the act of representing data as sound. Any data will do, but data that has a pattern will make better music, and if you don’t know whether your data has a pattern or not, sonification may help you find out.

The two sites from the article that I found particularly interesting are Math Sonification and Sound of Mathematics. I will try writing a meditation track using a Sonification pi over the next few weeks.

Whenever a new discovery or technology is adopted by the New Age marketing machine, it can change from being basically useful into a miracle cure sent to us by aliens, supreme beings, or the 9th sun god of the Aztec empire ( currently being channeled by Jerry Springer). The truth is mixed with huge doses of unsubstantiated claims, unrealistic promises and outright lies. It is easier to bend the truth with the New Age consumer, because they have a stronger desire for the fantastic to be real. Binaural beats is being subjected to the same suspicious marketing tactics. What is simply a curious auditory hallucination is now the basis of a large and lucrative industry that sell "enhanced" meditation music that is claimed to directly affect and alter your brain waves.

Binaural beats is an interesting phenomenon of the human auditory system. If you play two different tones that are very close together in pitch, separately into the the left and right ears, a single, pulsating sound is heard. This article will look more closely at how this works and explain the process in detail.

Most of these reviews will have some form of anecdote about me and the band/album in question. With Tribe After Tribe I get a little closer to the actual band, firstly they were originally formed in South African, and secondly a good friend of mine once ate lots of magic mushrooms with Robbi Robb, the singer/guitarist/chief strategy officer for Tribe After Tribe.