The Science Behind the Sounds

Binaural beats: a beat your brain makes

Play a 200 Hz tone in your left ear and a 204 Hz tone in your right, and you hear something that is in neither: a soft pulsing at 4 times a second, the difference between them. That pulse is a binaural beat. It is created inside the auditory system, where the signals from the two ears first meet in the brainstem, which is why binaural tracks only work on headphones. Played through speakers, the two tones mix in the air and the effect is lost.

The phenomenon was described by Heinrich Wilhelm Dove in 1839, and brought to a wide audience by the biophysicist Gerald Oster in a 1973 Scientific American article, “Auditory Beats in the Brain.”

Isochronic tones: a pulse you can hear on speakers

An isochronic tone is a single tone switched smoothly on and off at a steady rate, say 12 times a second. The rhythm is in the sound itself, so it works on speakers as well as headphones. It is the simpler and more direct cousin of the binaural beat, and it has been studied less.

Brainwave bands, and the idea of “following”

The electrical activity of the brain, measured by EEG, rises and falls in rhythms that researchers group into bands:

• Delta 0.5–4 Hz deep, dreamless sleep
• Theta 4–8 Hz drowsiness, light sleep, deep meditation
• Alpha 8–12 Hz relaxed, eyes closed, calm wakefulness
• Beta 13–30 Hz alert, focused, active thinking

The idea behind beat tracks is entrainment, or the “frequency-following response”: that listening to a steady rhythm may nudge brain activity toward the same rhythm. So a track meant for winding down uses a slow beat, and one for focus a faster one. Whether this happens reliably, and whether it changes how you feel, is exactly what the research is still arguing about (see below).

The CIA's Gateway report (1983)

In June 1983, U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Wayne M. McDonnell wrote Analysis and Assessment of Gateway Process, an assessment of the “Gateway Experience” training developed at The Monroe Institute in Virginia. The report was declassified and is published in the CIA's online reading room; it went viral in 2023.

The training used binaural beats (the institute calls its method Hemi-Sync, a trademark of The Monroe Institute) together with breathing, relaxation and visualisation exercises. The report describes a progression through numbered states, from a deeply relaxed state it summarises as “mind awake, body asleep”, through states of expanded awareness and of losing the sense of time, and it tries to explain the experiences in terms of physics, holograms and consciousness. Those explanations are the author's own speculation, not established science, and the report itself is an assessment, not a study with controls.

Our Gateway Sessions are not the Monroe Institute's recordings and use none of their material. They are new tone sessions of our own, built to follow the same shape the report describes: settle, deepen, hold, then come back.

Remote viewing, and what the government concluded

The same era produced a U.S. government programme, best known by its last name, Stargate, that tested “remote viewing”: trying to describe a distant, unseen target. In 1995 the CIA commissioned an outside review from the American Institutes for Research. Its reviewers disagreed about the laboratory statistics (the statistician Jessica Utts argued the effects were real; the psychologist Ray Hyman argued they were not shown), but the report concluded that remote viewing had never produced information useful to intelligence operations, and the programme was closed.

Our “Remote Viewing Practice” session is a recreation of that history, a structured exercise with chimes marking each interval, for the curious. It does not give you an ability, and we don't claim it does.

What the research actually shows

• Some measurable effects, small and inconsistent. A 2019 meta-analysis in Psychological Research (Garcia-Argibay, Santed & Reales) pooled studies of binaural beats and found small-to-moderate effects on memory, attention, anxiety and pain perception, with wide differences between studies.
• “Entrainment” is not settled. A 2023 systematic review in PLOS ONE (Ingendoh, Posny & Heine) looked at EEG studies of whether binaural beats actually shift brain rhythms and found the results contradictory: some studies supported it, more did not.
• Methods vary widely. A 2015 review in Frontiers in Psychiatry (Chaieb and colleagues) noted that studies use very different frequencies, durations and measures, which makes firm conclusions hard.

So the honest summary: many people find these sounds relaxing or helpful as a background for focus or sleep, and some studies support modest effects, but none of it is proven, and results differ from person to person. That's why we describe what each track is and what it's for, and never promise what it will do.

How our tracks are built

• Made entirely in code. Every tone, drone and noise bed is generated mathematically; nothing is sampled or licensed.
• Exact frequencies. Each track's beat frequency is in its name, and the Gateway Sessions glide smoothly between stages (we measure the finished files to check the beat is what we say it is).
• A soft bed underneath. Brown or pink noise and a quiet, slowly breathing drone, so the tones are pleasant to sit with rather than clinical.
• Level-matched. Every file is loudness-normalised to a gentle, consistent level, with fades in and out.

See the sound packs Try the Tone Lab

Listening safely

Keep the volume low. Don't listen while driving or doing anything that needs your full attention. If you have epilepsy or a seizure disorder, a heart condition or a pacemaker, or you are pregnant, ask your doctor first. These are sounds for relaxation and focus. They are not a medical device and are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any condition.

Sources

1. Oster, G. (1973). Auditory beats in the brain. Scientific American, 229(4), 94–102.
2. McDonnell, W. M. (1983). Analysis and Assessment of Gateway Process. U.S. Army; declassified, CIA reading room document CIA-RDP96-00788R001700210016-5.
3. Mumford, M. D., Rose, A. M., & Goslin, D. A. (1995). An Evaluation of Remote Viewing: Research and Applications. American Institutes for Research.
4. Chaieb, L., Wilpert, E. C., Reber, T. P., & Fell, J. (2015). Auditory beat stimulation and its effects on cognition and mood states. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 6, 70.
5. Garcia-Argibay, M., Santed, M. A., & Reales, J. M. (2019). Efficacy of binaural auditory beats in cognition, anxiety, and pain perception: a meta-analysis. Psychological Research, 83(2), 357–372.
6. Ingendoh, R. M., Posny, E. S., & Heine, A. (2023). Binaural beats to entrain the brain? A systematic review of the effects of binaural beat stimulation on brain oscillatory activity. PLOS ONE, 18(5), e0286023.

Hemi-Sync is a registered trademark of The Monroe Institute. OMMAIS is not affiliated with The Monroe Institute or the CIA.