Binaural beats are an interesting tool: they directly affect your brainwaves and they can alter your mood, behavior and even your consciousness. This is accomplished by inducing brainwave patterns through the use of stereo sound.

Binaural beats are the byproduct of how your brain perceives the nuances of stereo phasing: slightly different tones are played into each ear and your brain perceives the difference of the tones as a beat frequency. Clearly, the stereo directionality of the binaural beat carrier frequencies is important.

Let’s say that we play a 220 Hz carrier tone into the left ear and a 226.5 Hz carrier tone into the right ear. While processing the audio stimulus, the superior olivary nucleus portion of each hemisphere of the brain will also perceive a 6.5 Hz beat frequency, a frequency associated with the frontal midline theta rhythm.

Obviously, headphones make easy work of the stereo requirements of the binaural beat carrier frequencies. The left channel is fed directly into the left ear, the right channel is fed directly into the right ear, and your brain does the rest of the work. (It is perhaps worth mentioning that it is possible to effectively listen to binaural beats on speakers, but to get the best results, great care should be taken in the positioning of the speakers relative to your head.)

Binaural beats, headphones and earbuds | Higher-Music.com.

Brainwave entrainment is the use of some external stimulus, usually different sounds that a person will hear with stereo headphones, to induce a certain level of brain wave activity. When a person’s brainwave activity is artificially altered by these means, it will subtly shift their awareness and perception.

Using binaural beats is a common and effective method of brainwave entrainment. In order for the binaural beats to be effective, a person must be using stereo headphones so that they can hear a different sound in each ear.

Most of the time, the binaural beats will be embedded underneath the layers of tracks on a song, usually soothing ambient music or soundscapes, so that the person listening can focus on the music and not on the frequencies they are hearing. If you either find or create effective binaural beat audios to listen to in stereo heaphones, the frequencies should blend perfectly into the background, and you should not be able to consciously notice them unless you really try to isolate them.

via Self Improvement And Motivation: Increase Creativity and Redce Stess Using Alpha Meditation.