You'll Either Love It or Not: Binaural Beats in Max for Live

This week we start looking into some of the cool devices that people have been creating in Max for Live, and using them within the Max environment. We start off with a fun one: a binaural beat generator, in combination with a simple file player, that will simulate the research environment that people use to test the effectiveness of the binaural beat phenomenon.

• Download the patch I used in this article.

If you aren’t familiar with binaural beats, this is an area of interest where signals of slightly different frequencies are fed into separate ears of a subject, with the desired effect of a change in brain activity and/or facility. The jury is out on the effectiveness of binaural beats; some people (including people that I greatly respect) swear by them, while others consider them to be pseudo-science. If you want to do some reading, just Google the subject, or read through this Scientific American article by Gerald Oster.

Many of the studies combine two beating oscillators with the sound of a babbling brook; so that’s what I decided to simulate. But rather than synthesize this completely, I took advantage of two of my favorite resources: maxforlive.com and freesound.org.

On maxforlive.com, I found a great - as in complete - binaural beat generator called “Alpha”.

It has a simple interface, brainwave-specific frequency ranges and a basic visualizer. Drag it into a Max patch, add output routing, and you are halfway there. To create the babbling brook, I went to freesound.org and tapped one of my favorite recordists: Philip Goddard. Philip collects long-format recordings of soundscapes, and I found myself drawn to his recording of the River Teign in the UK.

This recording is in FLAC format, and is recorded at a very low volume, so I put it into my favorite audio editor, normalized it and saved it in WAV format. At that point, I could use the sfplay~ object to play it, set things up to start on launch, and I had the canonical binaural beats test patch.

My results? Mixed. I found it relaxing and stimulating, but probably more due to the quality of Philip’s nature recording and less due to the beating waves. But your mileage may vary - and you’ll at least have given it a try…

So do it!