Fine work, Scott--the best AudioStrobe encoding that I've yet seen. Thanks much for contributing them to our users, and I'm looking forward to your works to come! -Robert
Hi Tom, I'm very happy that you have enjoyed the sessions. I (and others) will be producing in many different styles including softer pad washes, environmental, and world music tracks. It just had to be that we started somewhere as the main focus was on the light track delivery. So consider these proof of concept from drones, to rhythmic music, to nature. I must admit I haven't tried them monocolor so I definitely appreciate you testing that and giving feedback. Makes a lot of sense why monocolor would not provide the full effect with 1 color channel. I will make some tracks specifically designed for this as I do really like white LEDs for entrainment. Scott
Thanks Scott, best 2-colour audiostrobe patterns ever! I have most of the audiostrobe library and they all seem to give the best patterns with red or white mono-coloured glasses. Your tracks cannot really be viewed very well with mono-coloured glasses because of the way you have faded in/out your 2 channels. Personally I prefer more new age music backgrounds like Isle of Glass. Great effort Jeff, thanks again.
Yes, on any AudioStrobe system...
Wow Scott, these are really cool. Awesome work! Thanks. Will this work on Proteus and Procyon?
Thanks for the kind words Scott. I appreciate the feedback and yes, it was HAAAARRRRDDDD (but, fun ... Laughing out loud). I was just lucky enough to have the career circumstances in life that gave me the VBA skills to leverage in this project. I actually like Mac's better; but, I've been forced to work with PC's (ha, ha). Take care.
This tool has been superseded and surpassed by the excellent implementation by MarkT Visual Segment Developer here: http://www.mindplacesupport.com/foru...ore-you-upload . Thanks for your efforts in this area MarkT. I know how hard it was. I was attempting to do it using strictly cross-platform Excel functions so I could use it on my Mac. But Visual Basic for Applications turned out to the be the way. Great job.. check it out everyone if you haven't already.
Thanks for that!
You've got the idea on Audiostrobe control. The VST is a softsynth that not only plays audiostrobe but has some very nice features as a tone generator for noise wave forms and modulates -quite a sophisticated plugin - with presets to load it could be a one stop shop entrainment program. It also has a sophisticated colour -organ which allows it to play audiostrobe from normal music files by setting frequency filters and playing with the amplitude envelope. I was involved as a beta tester and provided some ideas from early on. As Steve is hoping perhaps to do a commercial release some time you had better contact him about beta testing etc. My favorite self made entrainment tracks use Tibetan bowl loops and some short loopoed night sounds like crickets and frogs- definitely gets me in the zone like nothing else. It does amaze me that there has been so little progression in the audiostrobe content available beyond all the Tamas Lab release in the nineties. There is a lot of content around generated with transparent software , but I find it pretty uninspiring to listen to. Anyone can set some modulated white noise and beats and audiostrobe together now. That knife edge is the balance between aestheticism and entrainment value- Originally Posted by neuroasis Thanks synaesthesia! I contacted the author of the post about the VST plugin sometime back and he indicates that it not yet finished and he is very busy and won't complete it for a few months. You have this VST plugin? It turns out that it is quite easy to do though. Make a 19.5kHz sine wave and put it into any sampler. Then use an arpeggiator or manual sequence pattern to trigger it. Full pan left is LED #1 and full pan right is LED#2. A mixture of pan settings across the stereo spectrum mixes the LEDs. The amplitude of the audio controls the brightness and flash of the lights. I have it set up now where I can literally 'play' Audiostrobe sequences with my keyboard (or any MIDI controller). Very cool. Sometime soon I will make a tutorial on how I do it. These first tracks were just short 'teasers' that I will build larger sequences from. As I mentioned just proof of the concept that crickets still sound like crickets at brainwave frequencies. I have ambitious plans for this tech. Right you are on the fact that at this time music or sound effects are being used to just 'mask' the frequencies. There are many possibilities to go way beyond this. Thanks for your insightful comments!
Thanks synaesthesia! I contacted the author of the post about the VST plugin sometime back and he indicates that it not yet finished and he is very busy and won't complete it for a few months. You have this VST plugin? It turns out that it is quite easy to do though. Make a 19.5kHz sine wave and put it into any sampler. Then use an arpeggiator or manual sequence pattern to trigger it. Full pan left is LED #1 and full pan right is LED#2. A mixture of pan settings across the stereo spectrum mixes the LEDs. The amplitude of the audio controls the brightness and flash of the lights. I have it set up now where I can literally 'play' Audiostrobe sequences with my keyboard (or any MIDI controller). Very cool. Sometime soon I will make a tutorial on how I do it. These first tracks were just short 'teasers' that I will build larger sequences from. As I mentioned just proof of the concept that crickets still sound like crickets at brainwave frequencies. I have ambitious plans for this tech. Right you are on the fact that at this time music or sound effects are being used to just 'mask' the frequencies. There are many possibilities to go way beyond this. Thanks for your insightful comments!
Great work Neuroasis! I've download your FLAC audio and will give it a try on loop. Are you using something like Mind Workstation ? When you get to the point of wanting more unique control over Audiostrobe there is a great VST plugin around that enables you to control Audiostrobe pulses via MIDI so that you can orchestrate much more complex AS tracks than what is currently available the AVS software, so even a freeware Audio/ MMIDI sequencer program will allow further experimentation . I need to make available some more time to this but I got some very interesting results using an audio beat slicer to cut a nice rhythm done on an African Djembe drum into individual slices / notes then converting this rhythm information in to MIDI notes and triggering Audiostrobe in Unison . I'm not sure of exactly technically the entrainment effects, but it was definitely what I would call psycho-active and something that needs further exploration. If entrainment can be gained from more poly-rhythmic material it might open a field of more aesthetically based entrainment audio which could have great potential ..I guess at some stage this kind of thing just blends in to what we might call "music"
Originally Posted by Robert Austin Are you familiar with R Murray Schafer's work on acoustic ecology? He pioneered the field from Simon Fraser University back in the late 60s; he wasn't specifically looking at mode locking, just the ecological aspects. Turns out that say in a jungle, where there are a lot of different voices trying to be heard, and therefore the possibility of interference, various creatures have evolved to communicate within discrete audio channels, ranging from the subsonic (elephant foot-communications) to the ultrasonic (some insects, birds...). I recall noticing how the cicada songs in the large Japanese garden at Waseda University would form amplitude waves which traveled around the irregular garden. More in the vein of mode -locking I've heard some great examples of this here in Australia. Laying the long grass listening to some tiny crickets that were all in close - coming in to syncopation with each other and often playing a really nice rhythm like a small drum circle. Over here, the cicadas in the bush can be so numerous they are literally deafening- amazing to hear them all over the place ( a cacophony) and then suddenly all swing in to a syncopated pulse. Even more incredible one summer morning at a outdoor bush trance techno party you could here the unified pulse of the cicadas in the surrounding valley all move in to sync with the drum beats thundering out of the large sound system..
Thanks for posting this, Scott--what a great resource! Michael has created an excellent resource, and is one of the most knowledgeable 'old timers' in this field. The AVS Journal follows in the footsteps of Michael Hutchison's Megabrain Report (we'll be posting more issues of that in the near future, as well).
Wind and fire sounds good, and relaxing to boot (had to up my coffee input to combat its effects, heh). Laptop speakers won't do it full justice, so I'll break out my trusty Sennheiser headphones and an AS decoder when off work. The clicks are well disguised in the fire sounds--and it sounds like you might have been using variable click amplitudes? Nice work, please keep 'em coming!
I like the term "eco entrainment" and the concept. I also enjoyed reading your description of the evening event. Spotting a snake - how cool is that!! Interesting post and comments.
I took your suggestion Robert and created a track with some short clicks providing entrainment and embedded these in the sounds of crackling fire. Wind is also included. The track ramps from 10Hz to 6Hz. A FLAC version is available for download. Also I should mentioned that the sound effect has been 'warped' or 'time stretched' so that to the best of possibility it is fully aligned to the entrainment tempo. It is especially noticeable in the low frequencies. Also, a subtle LFO is added that reinforces the frequencies by modulating the sample. This is apparent in some of the sizzle. A holophonic sound stage is being used for the wind and there is a low amplitude click far in the background that is pulsing into a 3D reverb also providing entrainment. Thus, the entraining frequencies are reinforced on several levels. http://soundcloud.com/neuroasis/wind-and-fire-10hz-to-6hz
Great post, and nice writing, too... I think you're completely on the right track with this. I've tended to notice 'entrainment' in nature as well, actually mode-locking behaviors which operate at many scales in nature. Pendulum clocks on the same wall will eventually synchronize phase, despite starting in random phases, fireflies settle into flashing together (but: always a few outliers in biological systems). Are you familiar with R Murray Schafer's work on acoustic ecology? He pioneered the field from Simon Fraser University back in the late 60s; he wasn't specifically looking at mode locking, just the ecological aspects. Turns out that say in a jungle, where there are a lot of different voices trying to be heard, and therefore the possibility of interference, various creatures have evolved to communicate within discrete audio channels, ranging from the subsonic (elephant foot-communications) to the ultrasonic (some insects, birds...). I recall noticing how the cicada songs in the large Japanese garden at Waseda University would form amplitude waves which traveled around the irregular garden. Insects are not the most relaxing sounds--too intense in the high end, though judicious use of a phase vocoder, or maybe spectral inversion via Metasynth could help (I love Metasynth, it sometimes is a bit maddening... for example, being able to adjust the parameters used for transformation of audio file to image synth, which I assume is a fast fourier transform). But clicks are the most effective means of generating an audio evoked potential, and at least one publication reports that clicks up to 1000 Hz can produced resonant synchronous activity in the auditory cortex (this experiment involved someone who was being mapped for epilepsy surgery, and therefore had a batch of electrodes inserted into his brain). Clicks could be hidden in 'crackling fire' sounds to make them a bit more palatable, and of course, the flicker and crackle frequencies dominant in a campfire tend to be in the same range as our brainwaves...
Hi neuroasis, Thanks for your comments. If you are interested in Fourier Transforms in Excel, apparently it isn't too difficult as it has tools to do this: http://excelunusual.com/archive/2011...form-tutorial/ and: http://www.brainmapping.org/NITP/PNA...urierExcel.htm. Unfortunately, I have no experience of plotting Fourier transforms in Excel or otherwise! Keep up the good work!
Hello Jules and welcome to the forum. Thank you for your comment. Yes I do realize that a square wave can be generated from a sine wave by adding harmonics. An added third harmonic and fifth harmonic can create an approximation but it is really all odd harmonics that generate the true square (and a duty cycle of 50%). What I am discussing is how it is plotted in Excel. I am not using Fourier transform equations because of the deep complexity (and honestly they are over my head). If you have some experience plotting these in Excel I am very interested. As mentioned earlier Excel has its own way of doing things with regards to generating dynamic graphs so I am hacking it around a bit to output a reasonable facsimile of the waveform that is driving the on/off cycles of the LEDs. My graphs are not displaying audio. Most (or even all) past LED Light glasses used in AVS were simple pulse waveforms (full on, full off accounting for amplitude). The Procyon introduced ramping with sine and triangle waveforms driving the display. So that is what I am modeling. But more so the interaction between the 3 colors (RGB) that combine to produce a full range of the spectrum. In practice it can be somewhat difficult to estimate the effect of settings. This way we can study and work with static graphs to increase our understanding. As far as isochronic tones go, and this is in the audio realm, the Procyon can produce them in the editor. You can use the settings from one of the light channels to modulate the audio. The right and left sides of the stereo image are independent so you could use a different modulation source (again one of the light channels) on each of them. You can also program binaural beats by a frequency variance in the two channels which would produce the entrainment beat as 250Hz L and 260Hz R would produce a 10Hz beat. Concerning the website you reference, you wouldn't be able to convert those files but you can create sessions with similar settings or you could use that audio along with any of the Mindplace machines and program the lights to follow them or even experimentally overlay different entrainments. All these would depend on knowing the original settings or possibly even determining them from spectral analysis. Once again, your suggestions, help and comments are much appreciated!
Hi, I'm new here and don't know anything about Procyon programming, but I do know something about electronics. I'm not sure if you know that square waves are in fact constructed from sinewaves? Vis: --VVV--VVV--VVV-- . It also happens that the Procyon is designed to play sine waves only via audio. Not sure about the glasses. See here: http://www.mindplacesupport.com/foru...ble-on-Procyon. It also happens that the waveform shown above could also be turned into isocronic beats which apparently are more effective, but little research has been done on them. Anyone know if we can convert these: http://www.iso-tones.com/ ?
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