Hypnogogy Revisited: Schumann V

Exploring the possible implications of Schumann frequencies

Greetings mutants and norms!

Put on headphones (or earbuds, or a headset, just anything that’s different in both ears) to hear the effect properly:

Back last year when I was enrolling in classes for the fall

Stephanie Molchan

told me to listen to binaural beats. I started researching them to see if it was just a gimmick or there was some kind of advantage over other forms of beats since I’d largely assumed it was just a gimmick until then. I decided it was not a gimmick and listened to different beats but I didn’t find any I liked that aligned perfectly with the research I had done and what I thought was the most useful, so I started creating my own in Audacity and this led to the creation of my album Hypnogogy which I published on Tunecore in November of last year and wrote an article about on Substack shorty after I joined.

One thing I determined is that, despite the common conception that binaural beats are predominantly for brain entrainment, it’s true that monaural beats such as isochronic tones are better at creating a brain-wide state of entrainment. However, a brain-wide state of entrainment is not the point, the really interesting aspect of binaural beats is that they increase hemispheric connectivity which research has shown is one of the most important things regarding intelligence, creativity, etc.

Binaural Beats through the Auditory Pathway: From Brainstem to Connectivity Patterns - PMC (nih.gov)

When I created the two tracks Schumann V Clear and Schumann V Ganzfeld on Hypnogogy, I had heard a lot about the Schumann frequencies, and I thought they seemed important since it’s caused by electromagnetic phenomena on the Earth making these radio signals and it’s true that those are approximately the same ranges that human brainwaves are at, and brainwaves overwhelmingly appear to be electromagnetic.

However, all these New Age hippie kinds of music I thought didn’t have the correct perception of the phenomenon. For one thing, there are several main Schumann frequencies and not only one, and the base Schumann frequency seems to actually be really disturbing when taken on its own since it’s actually in a frequency band that’s known as mu, and I consider that frequency band to be really uncomfortable, since it seems not fast enough for so-called normal cognition but it’s not slow enough for altered states either. In fact, the mu frequencies remind me of sleep paralysis. The frequencies of mu seem to be a sort of threshold that you don’t want to get stuck in and this is quite interestingly the lowest frequency of the Schumann resonances that probably have some sort of electromagnetic influence on all life on Earth. Perhaps this is actually related to the base conscious state, like the lowest state of ordinary consciousness is actually somehow related to the Earth’s electromagnetic pulses and anything below that is an altered state because you’re becoming disconnected from the Earth. In that case you definitely don’t want to listen to 7.83 Hz all the time, because aside from the fact this seems like the frequencies of sleep paralysis, it’s also keeping you tethered to the earthly state of consciousness instead of getting to experience altered states. Then, no one said the Gaia cult was all that bright. I did create Schumann frequency tracks too just so people can actually hear the bare Schumann fundamental frequency without all the New Age music covering it up and see what I mean, but I don’t recommend listening to it for any purposes other than experimental ones since I don’t think it’s useful, it’s just not that harmful to briefly see what it is.

Meanwhile, most of the results you find on YouTube if you search for Schumann frequencies will be this kind of thing:

That is literally just trying to use music to mask the unpleasant sounds from the second set of Hypnogogy tracks I posted.

When I created the Schumann V tracks, I simply just looked up what the Schumann frequencies were and added the first five, and alternated ears for each frequency to maximize the interference and the sound balance, then I made a version with pink noise like I did with all of the tracks. Notice how different of an effect it is from the other ones that are out there. There’s still the 7.83 Hz frequency, but it interferes with other, much faster frequencies which in turn actually makes slower frequencies via this principle:

That is the “beat” interference pattern that is itself responsible for all binaural beats, but when you have multiple together, you get even more interference patterns. And notice that the beat is indeed at a much lower frequency than either of the individual waves because it’s a product of their two frequencies. The reason I made most of my beats at these low frequencies compared to what’s normally put out there is because I was trying to make the acoustics themselves at products of the binaural beats so there would be more interference patterns and they would be regular, particularly, interference between the frequencies and the beats themselves.

Additionally, some of my personal experimentation shows that you can hear binaural beats above the 30 Hz range and even above the 40 Hz range if your brainwaves are that fast, and the inverse is true where you won’t hear any binaural beats, even slow ones, if you stop producing brainwaves for a certain amount of time. Very little research is done along these lines because most of the people trying to research these things in labs still believe that the brain only uses chemical processes even though other researchers in neurology have known for a while the brain does indeed use electromagnetic processes. In fact, most neurologists didn’t expect there to even be any brainwaves with frequencies above 30 Hz because that’s a lot faster than individual neurons can fire, but since brainwaves are travelling waves, you actually can have waves that fire much more quickly than individual neurons if the individual neurons are firing as part of the faster wave in sequence but not firing every iteration of it. All electromagnetic waves are standing waves, so I see this has very strong evidence the brain is essentially a flexible electrooptic metasurface and consciousness really is kind of like a computer with hardware and software in some ways, but very different in others since no computer on the planet uses all those technologies at once yet even if they are all known to exist.

Traveling vs. standing waves

‘Traveling’ nature of brain waves may help working memory work | Picower Institute (mit.edu)

Neurons are fickle. Electric fields are more reliable for information. | Picower Institute (mit.edu)

Flexible Photonic Crystal from Liquid Thin-Film Metasurface (spie.org)

As for why I used pink noise as the background of mine and not the more-popular white and brown noise, the reason for that is entirely for sensory deprivation. You’re not really supposed to listen to and enjoy the pink noise, it’s just supposed to block other things out the most effectively.

Grey noise - Wikipedia

Grey noise is random noise whose frequency spectrum follows an equal-loudness contour (such as an inverted A-weighting curve).

The result is that grey noise contains all frequencies with equal loudness, as opposed to white noise, which contains all frequencies with equal energy. The difference between the two is the result of psychoacoustics, more specifically the fact that the human hearing is more sensitive to some frequencies than others.

Since equal-loudness curves depend not only on the individual but also on the volume at which the noise is played back, there is no one true grey noise.^[1] A mathematically simpler and clearly defined approximation of an equal-loudness noise is pink noise which creates an equal amount of energy per octave, not per hertz (i.e. a logarithmic instead of a linear behavior), so pink noise is closer to "equally loud at all frequencies" than white noise is.^[2]

This is why I use pink noise for the purposes of sensory deprivation and not white or brown noise, since the purpose is just to drown out as much sound as possible. If you didn’t know, noise-cancelling headphones also work on the principle of interference: they detect environmental noise and play sounds that cancel them out.

This is the entire playlist of Hypnogogy for free on YouTube in case anyone wants to play with or just listen to more of it:

Hypnogogy - YouTube

And if anyone wants to listen to pink noise, enjoy the perceptual silence created by a lack of stimuli which are always the result of change rather than objects!