Slashdot Mirror
Sound As the New Illegal Narcotic?
ehrichweiss writes "The Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics is warning parents and teachers of a new threat to our children: sounds. Apparently kids are now discovering binaural beats and using them to get 'physiological effects.' The report goes on with everyone suggesting that such aural experiences will act as a gateway to drug usage and even has one student claiming there are 'demons' involved. Anyone who has used one of those light/sound machines knows all about the effects that these sounds will give and to state that they will lead kids to do drugs is nonsense at best. It seems the trend in scaring the citizens with a made-up problem has gone to the next level."
... Whiskey Tango Foxtrot to the max ...
Up until high school, I spent my entire life locked into an ideal Norman Rockwell painting. No cares, no worries and just high on life. Things took a turn for the worse one day when I picked up an 288 tuning fork and a 320 tuning fork. I struck them both against my leg and held one up near either ear.
... COMPLETE EAR DESTRUCTION!
It was pure bliss. Like Jesus was just 32 hertz away from me. I wish I could describe the feeling. Like half of all the blades of grass in the universe were hummingbirds and the other half were bumble bees.
Let's see--I was a freshman at that time. Yeah, things just went downhill from there. I had earrings made with a tuning fork hanging from each one. The left side was A440 and the right side was a custom 444. I could raise my fingers to either lobe and flick it for instant gratification. The other kids called it ear basing. I called it god. And he was just nineteen dollars and eighty cents on Amazon. By my sophomore year I was already pretty hard into Fourier transforms. Everyone's tympanic membrane had a bifurcation sweet spot that could be exploited with the right theoretical frequencies. Yeah, we would rent middle of nowhere motel rooms to smelt hematite down into custom tuning forks and poor them into clay molds in the bathtub. We paid in cash and by the time the cleaning made hit the room it was slag burns in the carpet and clay all over the place. You probably remember the 20/20 investigations following all the reports.
Shit got real heavy real quick and one day we found Scrye (nickname for the metallurgist) hemorrhaging blood out of his ears in a coma from strapping two subwoofers to either side of his head with duct tape. I knew I had to get out, but how?
We gathered up all our text books on math, audio & music theory, physics, chemistry, electronics and metalworking and burned them in the parking lot of the hospital we brought Scrye to. I would never read about science again.
Parents, heed the images of those children getting 'innocent' highs from sounds and make sure they don't make the same mistake I did. This is just a gateway to bigger and badder things. If you find literature on Fourier Analysis, Electronics or Calculus in your child's bedroom, please get your child to Oklahoma and get them help from the nearest minister. I don't care if you have to lock them up in the basement against their will. Just make sure you save them from the same fate as I
My work here is dung.
So now they're going to be carrying around level_upper.mp3 on their iZunes?
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I sing because I live with Satan.
THL phish sticks
This reminds me of that story from a couple years ago where news media reported that kids were getting high on human feces. Jenkem
Kids these days getting high on new beats! The sky is falling!
Back in my day it was only Techno and we walked to school, uphill both ways. Now get off my lawn.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
"It seems the trend in scaring the citizens with a made-up problem has gone to the next level."
Yeah no kidding, and you know why? People on Madison Ave. make huge money figuring out ways to sell more useless products to the populace. It has been proven that fear and uncertainty can significantly drive sales. Don't believe me? Google "fear drives sales"
Did you ever wake up in the morning, with a Zombie Woof behind your eyes? -- FZ
This kind of insanity is just plain stupid. Binaural beats have a documented psycho-dynamic effect ... programs like Hemi-Sync are intriguing. I don't think people are going to get "high" off of them though. But what if they do? If binaural beats are made illegal and deemed "narcotic", then the "drug war" is more about denying people access to their own minds.
As this beating phenomenon is used by musicians the world over to tune their instruments, I now predict a great increase in high school band participation.
I can't stop laughing. This is hysterically stupid and, well, I had to check the calendar to make sure I wasn't three months ahead...
Nope! Not April 1st... Okay, that makes them taking this seriously a little more scary...
I bet they're sitting around drinking beverages heavily laced with dihydrogen monoxide, too.
Some people have it coming - I'm just the delivery system.
Anyone else ever mess with the "Brainwave Syncronizer" In Cool Edit?
I suffer from occasional severe insomnia, and burning a full CD that gradually slowed the binaural beats down into the deep sleep stage was the ONLY non-narcotic solution to ever work.
Sad to realize all these years later, the only reason it worked is because it was my gateway to ambien...~
"Binaural Beats" actually do produce pysiological effects by stimulating certain parts of the brain, but they're pretty weak in my experience, slight lethargy or increased heart rate at best. I know some people who are highly susceptible to them and get strong effects but even they find them to be too much trouble for the effect and only used them a few times as a novelty.
that said, the idea that they could work as a gateway to drugs isn't TECHNICALLY without merit. Trying these could lead to wanting to see what the real drug they're supposed to be emulating is like. But you're just as, if not more, likely to want to try drugs after watching Dazed and Confused than listening to binaural
My friend and I used to sit on opposite sides of another friend and sing a falsetto "oooooo" at slightly different frequencies. Her annoyance was entertaining at the time, but now I can't help but worry what kind of life we got her into. She's probably dead in a gutter somewhere, in a pair of studio headphones.
If binaural beats are made illegal and deemed "narcotic", then the "drug war" is more about denying people access to their own minds.
This is what the drug war has *always* been about. The rest of you are just now starting to figure it out.
"It's not a war on drugs, it's a war on personal freedom. Keep that in mind at all times." - Bill Hicks
There is a war going on for your mind.
"Hello?" ... I wanna give you some good frequencies .. 1710, 2.6, 2245...' .. "
"Yeah it's me
"Yeah?"
"... 3032, 400
"Four hundred?"
"Yeah."
"I'm coming right over!"
"Do that."
46 & 2
I'm certain that the ppl at slashdot understand that is complete bullshit and have just posted it to see what kinda responses they would get.
Be honest. I've been to band camp, and those weren't flutes you and Suzy were blowing.
I made this video a while back - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weOpxELqn-c - I've done a lot of research on binaural beats. They are used to calm the mind and promote a lower brain operating frequency that is akin to relaxation or meditation. Some people say it's a placebo effect, others use it to promote a state of calm in their minds as they try to rid themselves of the daily thought process (many, many thoughts coming in and out of your head very quickly, which is associated with high brain frequencies). Trying to demonize BBs would be like trying to demonize meditation...which I'm sure isn't too far off.
I guess the fear surrounding what people don't understand will never go away. I suggest a split in civilization - let the smarties burrow deep into the soil and the dummies can fry up at the surface.
Sorry for the strange comment, I'm high on binaural beats. :p
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Sounds like a ploy to get rid of Cell phones, mp3 players, etc. from campus to me. There is a motivation here other than what is being delivered as with most things today. Redirection and NAT are being employed to shuttle popular opinion to a place where it does not need to be. Just my 2c...
Yes, but what happens if you listen to it backwards?
Planning to be moderated ± 1: Bad Pun.
Those dudes that attacked Dan Rather must've just thought he was a dealer!
But now we KNOW the frequency, Kenneth!
I once bought some level_upper off a buddy, and I thought it was the real deal, but as soon as I took the first hit I knew it was laced with Lady Gaga. Now I'm hooked on pop music :( Just be careful where you buy your sound from guys.
I am a user of binaural beats (not of the illicit/druggie type) but for more sober stuff. I use this for meditation "Hemi-Sync.Gateway Experience" and to enhance focus and concentration "Hemi Sync Metamusic". If you can get hold of Hemi-Sync Metamusic "Einstein's Dream", you will know what I am talking about.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monroe_Institute
http://www.hemi-sync.com/
Sounds like we're on our way to semuta addicts...
I used to TA for a physics course and one of the labs was about sound waves. We used empty plastic tubes and generated sound of a given frequency into them, then the students would change the length of the resonant cavity and find where the standing waves formed, and calculate the speed of sound from this. Then, the final part of the lab was to take the speakers and generate slightly different frequency tones and listen for the beat frequency. I guess this lab is now illegal in Oklahoma!
With a bit of training, you can do it without the headphones or music or drugs It's done in monasteries all the time. Some religious groups do it with repeated chanting. na-mu-my-h-ren-ge-ky y'all.
I've heard a lot of talk of binaural beats since getting into lucid dreaming, both of which I found out about on the Dreamviews website. What I learned from there was similar to what this article states, except it comes from people who get themselves educated on the subject and discuss it, or they're just asking about binaural beats. Either way, this article sounds rather absurd to me. Music has been a gateway to drugs for decades, it's just a matter of how you look at it. Saying that listening to it makes you want to get high introduces nothing new, and is, like mentioned before, just some scare tactic to achieve some goal. Shame on them.
FRACTALS, are your children being exposed to visual ACID?
There is one slight error in your very good writeup on how binaural beats works. What you described, playing two notes on two different sound producers (in this case tuning forks), causes an actual, physical, "beat". The sound waves interfere or combine with one another in physical space, and a new sound wave (or a composite of the two, same difference) is created and propogated through air, the medium of sound.
The binaural beats mentioned here work a little differently, in that a recording is played, and it must be listened through headphones. One ear hears a certain pitch or frequency, the other ear hears a different pitch or frequency. The difference here is that neither ear "hears" a beat, the beat is created entirely in the brain of the listener. I am not a neurobiologist so I cannot explain the exact mechanism, but it appears it has something to do with how the brain processes sound and attempts to internally combine the two different sounds into a single perception/experience for the consciousness.
I checked out some binaural beat programs once. Basicly just sine wave (or fancier) generators that let you pick the frequency for the left output and right output. If I listed on one ear only using headphones, I hear a single frequency. If I listen to both ears, I hear the two frequencies, AND I perceive a beat in addition to that, that only exists in my brain. Its at the very least neat. At the very most I didn't notice any particular effects on myself, and didn't get addicted or anything to it.
The claim or assumption of the binaural beats people is that the low frequency beats can be used to simulate in the brain the delta waves or alpha waves or whatever waves are associated with deep sleep, or relaxation, or whatever. Again I am not a neurobiologist, so I can't say if this does anything.
Playing two tuning forks together or tuning a guitar is pretty neat to me too.
you will notice of course, that portugal's efforts are aimed at reducing drug use
in other words, their tactics are different, but the goal is the same: reduce drug use
so there will always be a war on drugs, forever. in fact, there always was a war on drugs. tactics change, but reducing drug use in society is merely a constant maintenance function of civilization, like taking out the trash every thursday, that will never end. you don't declare a "war on garbage" and clean your apartment up once, and never again have to worry about garbage. no, that's not the nature of the problem. same with drugs: its not some sort of "war" you win once and never have to fight again. no, its a constant low grade clean up effort
so yes: the notion of a "war" on drugs is stupid, but whatever you call it ("the cleanup on drugs", "the trash collection on drugs"?) you must realize something absolutely true: the reduction of drug use is an effort that will never end, whatever the tactics, forever
and if you don't know why drug use has to be constantly cleaned up, you don't know much about your world and human nature
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I've been studying Shamanistic meditation, Kundalini and sexual Tantra, looking for something to quiet my mind and help me deal with my ADD more effectively. I got off the drugs about ten years ago and slowly my mind's becoming more organized; I'm not learning to cope with the voices and hyper-awareness, I'm actually getting better. The hyper-awareness is different, still present but completely reformed, and a powerful tool. I'm at a point where I'd like to polish up what's left, put some structure on myself enough to better organize myself; it used to be impossible to learn to play instruments, now it's difficult and I can't retain progress but it does come. A little work, and maybe I can actually accomplish something in my life.
The options for assistance to relax and open the mind include mexican magic mushrooms, LSD, marijuana, and even alcohol; but although I drink, it's not really to get drunk (and drunkenness is painful and destabilizing for me, it's effectively like having the flu). I'd rather not play with any of that other junk; so I need either much patience and concentration, or a substitute.
What I found in my studies was that the old places were made to do things with sound... beating drums, chants, hums, anything... they were tuned to amplify the certain sounds that put your mind into a particular state. I did some deeper digging, sideways research, and found the details of binaural beats; a quick experiment with this gave me some interesting answers. I expected nothing, or at most a gentle feeling of calm; when I kicked it on and had it pull the beating from 20Hz down to 7Hz in 3 seconds, I nearly blacked out. I yanked the headphones off but felt pretty fucking groggy for a few seconds, before I managed to shake it off.
This is it, this is what I need. Something subtle... music, designed with soft instruments, different wave patterns such that the beat is lost between them, like a flute and a gentle saxophone or a piano... but enough that the effect occurs, gently. Something to ease my mind in an unnatural way, without a drug. My refusal to use substance-based aids for this has lead me to this strikingly effective, pleasant, and constructive solution: rather than encourage drug use, we can encourage a new art form, an exploration into a new method of music creation, new tools transcending just instruments and effects and paradigms.
The most striking thing of all is that these considerations mimic Timothy Leary's thoughts on LSD: this has the potential to expand minds, to drive us as a people towards a period of inner reflection and a search for something beyond the mundane life trying to scratch out a few dollars while being watched over by people in power. Leary thought the drug would do that, would expand peoples' minds, make them start a search for something more, a search for something beyond the bland existence we follow.
I don't support the use of dangerous substances-- LSD may not be so toxic, but it can remain in the system and randomly re-assert itself at any time, even at very bad times; mushrooms are toxic and can cause severe damage. I also believe that people are idiots, and the use of such substances recreationally is pure idiocy; encouraging any general use will swiftly lead to 99.999% of use being an expression of this idiocy, and destruction of society (remember, long ago, mushrooms were considered sacred and not seen as a recreational toy by the masses; this world no longer allows that manner of thinking).
I do, however, strongly encourage introspection to discover one's motives in life, as well as a general examination of the world to attempt to understand and even improve upon the machine we live in. The use of such auditory methods is not inherently addictive; there is no tainted chemistry taking place, and it substitutes as sleep (meaning you sleep less, 6 hours instead of 8 hours). It is not toxic, because it's not a chemical. It's not dangerous, because it's not a physical, life-depriving act such as auto-asphyxiation. This could be a powerful and benign tool for those who wish to walk a path without walking too close to a certain less desirable parallel path.
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Except it's not the same at all. A beat from two similar frequencies is an actual acoustic effect caused by cyclic constructive and destructive interference between the two waves.
A binaural beat is a phenomenon that you only get when you listen: it's two frequencies played back via headphone so that they don't interfere. The beat is purely an artifact of your perceptions.
Not posting AC, because (having, y'know, actually familiarized myself with the topic of the story) I actually know what's going on.
why the hell do you think "natural" has or should have anything to do with legality?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Brian Dunning of the podcast Skeptoid debunked this ages ago: http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4147
... tuning a guitar is pretty neat to me too.
Now if we could only get more guitarists to do it...
That is all.
Maybe even to the dark side of the moon.
include $sig;
1;
I'll tell you, as a non-drug user (besides caffeine and rare alcohol), that the War on Drugs itself is at fault for such misconceptions. You see, I've known people who habitually and recreationally use various banned substances. As a result, I knew that most of the government messages regarding drugs were complete fabrications. Not familiar or interested in the specifics, I treated all of this information as suspect. Only after talking to an experienced drug user did I discover that "yeah, meth is really bad, dangerous, addictive, and horrible." When the government message and the War on Drugs treats things like marijuana as something significantly scary, evil, dangerous, etc... compared to tobacco and alcohol, they do a disservice to everyone. When someone obtaining a recreational substance less dangerous than alcohol also has the opportunity to buy much more dangerous things, and has the same "information" about them, that's where the whole "gateway drug" problem comes in.
My take: put all of it on store shelves and provide real actual data about the stuff being sold. Those who want to kill themselves on meth are people who will cause problems anyway... at least under that situation they won't burn down an apartment complex manufacturing it, or rob houses to pay for a habit no more costly than Night Train.
Make them legally equal, but informationally distinguished, as opposed to the current, more dangerous reversed situation. And this just applies to one benefit...eliminating a ton of violent crime, property crime, and wasted tax dollars would be mere side effects.
Heavy water isn't that safe to drink:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_water#Effect_on_biological_systems
If I have two tuning forks hanging on either side of my head, the sounds they produce will still interfere in the air.
If I put two earphones in and play a sine wave in each of them, the sounds will not interfere in the air. I will be hearing one tone and precisely one tone in each ear; there isn't a tone from the left bouncing off the wall and reaching my right ear.
In the first case, it is the waves in the air interfering to make the beat frequency. In the second case, the interference happens in the brain. The waves don't exist in the same place at the same time, and hence they can't interfere in the way that makes a beat frequency in air.
So yeah. You're wrong.
Society has mechanisms in place to deal with addicts. Criminalizing the possession of a substance only serves to make an already bad situation worse. People who are drug addicts eventually lose their jobs, friends, etc. That is enough of a punishment. A person can't be saved from themselves. They need to learn their own lessons.
Nothing new under the sun. This dates me, but when I was in high school the local branch of the John Birch Society advertised an upcoming presentation called "Pot, Rock, and Revolution" that was going to expose how the jungle beat of rock & roll stimulates primitive brain responses and was part of a Communist plot to turn the youth of America into zombies. They seriously cited the Beatles' "Back in the USSR" as propaganda piece, clueless to its status as a parody of "Back in the USA", etc. So a group of long-haired kids went to the meeting, attracting nervous stares but surprisingly little outright hostility, and amazed the crowd by noting that several of us had straight-A grades despite a life-long diet of rock music.
and disagree. Education: yes. Using erowid as a single source: definitely not.
My nephew found an old tank of freon from an A/C service cart at a diesel repair shop. After reading the info and reports at erowid he believed he was perfectly safe to inhale from the tank. Apparently none of the reports and info on erowid mentions the dangers of inhaling freon from an A/C service machine: which is full of oil and contaminates from all the service discharges performed.
My nephew got more than he bargained for. Fortunately the I'm-sure-I'm-dying spell only lasted a couple days and only required one trip to the ER.
I would have told him, had he simply asked. However, not so sure he would have listened seeing as how brilliant the internet has turned him.
damaged by dogma
I used to use this quite a bit and create my own experiences. What is does is force your brain waves into different states of consciousness (usually theta, associated with sleep). It takes a while to learn and get your brain used to making changes while conscious. After a while though it is possible to do without the listening to the "beats".
It's not really music, but it’s like these two tones, one in each ear that produces the beat, which only exists in your head. So you sit there and listen to two tones, then you start to hear a beat, but is more sounds like ocean waves. Then it becomes almost like you feel like dreaming and if you close your eyes you might start to.
With enough training one can begin to lucid dream and it's hard to explain but in some of the sessions I experienced what could only be explained as a non-sexual full body orgasm of pure bliss. It also reduces the amount of sleep one would require in order to feel properly rested. It is really good stuff and even better when you learn to shift your brain waves without the beats while conscious.
the worst jail in the most orwellian government authoritarian nightmare you can imagine, doesn't begin to compare to the bars drug addiction places in the mind.
where before a mind might contemplate philosophy, literature, art, now you have an interrupt cycle which turns this person into a drug seeking zombie
So what? There's millions of people who do nothing but sit in front of the TV watching reality shows and collecting welfare checks. They certainly aren't contemplating philosophy. Are you going to ban stupidity too?
You can't force people to be free. You can only provide them freedom to make their own choices, for better or for worse. If they choose to create a prison for themselves, whether it's a drug-induced haze or a mind-numbing existence of watching The Hills, trying to force people to live the way you want will only cause problems.
As weird as this is to the "concerned parents and teachers" in Oklahoma, it is a basic effect of our minds and perception. There are no demons, no narcotic gateways, no pushers, and for most people, no permanent effects(*).
When the "Brain Machine" aka Sound-Light Machine (SLM) article came out in MAKE, I immediately built one. For me, it works great, and the visuals I see tend to be geometric patterns, depending on the frequency of the beats. It can be quite intense. For those who haven't seen this, apart from the silly graphics on the glasses as pictured in the article, the "brain machine" is a pair of safety glasses with LEDs, the microcontroller, and a headphone jack. The LEDs flash in synchronicity to the binaural beats, and this is what makes it so powerful -- your brain gets two very important senses stimulated the same way. Once the sequence finishes, the effect is totally over, there is no linger feeling, or "high" or demonic possession.
They used to sell audio cassettes that had binaural beat recordings. After I built the SLM, a friend showed me cassettes he had purchased a couple decades ago in Europe, but I haven't heard them to compare.
(*) The only caution I can think of is the possibility of bad effects in people susceptible to seizures. I don't know enough about that condition to know if seizures can be triggered through our hearing, but the SLM-like devices could possibly be a trigger to light-sensitive individuals.
One can find lots of related devices on the net. In no order are:
MindSpa
Procyon AVS
For helping with autism: Audio/Visual Entrainment
Seeing this video I can't help but laugh. It's the same tired Suburbanite Scare Story that D&D was in the 70's-80's, or that "satanic cults" were in the 80's.
so you want the GOVERNMENT to hand out addictive drugs?
think about that for a second, moron
in the name of the fight for freedom from oppressive government policy, you want to hand government the greatest tool of oppression possible: addictive drugs
i'm sorry, but in a world where the government is doling out heroin, freedom really is dead
people worry about the government having national id cards or keeping tabs on your internet posting. people complain about the opiates of the masses: television and entertainment news, killing our minds
and here you sit, advocating that the government become the drug dealer!
so you like being a slave, huh?
hilarious!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
After working 6 years in a TV station, I can tell a real story
Apparently working 6 years in a TV station doesn't qualify you to do jack: http://www.news9.com/Global/story.asp?S=12793977
(Undoing all my mods because someone is wrong on the internet, and being a huge asshole about it)
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
I played the above youtube video and found myself laughing hysterically. Is that the same effect?
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
All the things you talk about are problems caused by prohibition, not drugs.
mediocrity rules, man