The Story Behind Binaural Beats - Cory Allen | Modern Wisdom Podcast 254

Cory Allen is an audio engineer, meditation coach and author. Binaural Beats have been brought into popularity over the last few years for assisting meditation, deep focus, sleep and more. But what are they and how do they work? Big thanks to Cory for his insights and for cutting some of his awesome tracks into this episode for a very unique listening experience where you'll get to hear exactly how Binaural Beats sound. Sponsor: Get a 21 Day Free Trial to a supercharged calendar at https://usewoven.com/wisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Follow Cory on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/heycoryallen/ Check out Cory's Website - http://www.cory-allen.com/ Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #binauralbeats #meditation #focus - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Cory Allen?

  So in bottom beats, there's not rhythmic elements commonly because of that. You want the listener to lose track of time, as it were, to further sink into the actual effect of the thing. So musically, there's generally just kind of textual things. Some people use nature of sounds and stuff. It is interesting how the musical quality works as a sort of obfuscation of the technical element in some way. So you sort of aren't really focused on that as much. You're listening to the top layer and the bottom layer is doing all the dirty work.

• 0:32Chris Williamson?

  Cory bloody Allen in the building. How are you, friend?

• 0:37Cory Allen?

  I'm good, man. How's your Achilles?

• 0:39Chris Williamson?

  It's slowly reattaching my leg to my foot, which is what I wanted. I've been walking around for quite a while in flip flops in Dubai, to which my physiotherapist said, cut them up and throw them in the bin immediately. But yeah, I'm back, I'm back in the UK, a little bit of a tan and ready to get back on the rehab.

• 1:00Cory Allen?

  That sounds like a coming of age novel, Flip Flops in Dubai.

• 1:06Chris Williamson?

  It is. I found myself and it was a proper pair of shoes.

• 1:11Cory Allen?

  Nice, man. Well, I'm glad it's healing. I just remembered that as, as we started here.

• 1:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it was a serious, a serious setback, but honestly, man, the, I found a level of fortitude that kind of came out of me that I didn't even know existed. It was so bizarre. I thought, I don't know, I thought I knew, it was like opening a door inside of a house I'd lived in my entire life, that, to a room that I didn't know existed. And I'm very much kind of found a level of resilience that was almost like, it was almost endogenous, it almost surfaced when it was needed in a way that kind of makes me question about just how cerebral and just how much I know about myself.

• 1:57Cory Allen?

  Yeah. So what were you fighting against?

• 2:00Chris Williamson?

  It was more that I presumed when I would reach a setback like that, some serious trauma, that...

• 2:09Chris Williamson?

  But I've gone through periods of depression and sadness and stuff like that before. And I just thought, oh, man, my constitution is not going to do well with this kind of a setback. Despite all of the stoicism and fantastic guests I've spoken to on this show and all the rest of it. I just presumed that I would, I didn't think I had the sort of makeup that would deal with it fantastically well. And honestly, like a lot, a lot of it was hard work and I can be proud of the development in myself that I've done to get myself to that point. But there was something else as well. There was another few gears inside of me that I didn't know I was going to find. And um, yeah, I didn't have the world ending inertia that I perhaps feared was going to occur.

• 2:54Chris Williamson?

  And very quickly was able to focus on doing what I could do. Um, and you hear this all the time, right? You hear it about people who go through tragedies and who end up using that as the springboard for something even greater.

• 3:06Cory Allen?

  Mm hmm.

• 3:07Chris Williamson?

  Um, and I, it's kind of just a bit like a fable that, isn't it? You just think, uh, well, yeah, that's good for them.

• 3:12Cory Allen?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's also kind of good and bad because it, that's one of the things that is sort of a problem in, in culture right now is the inability for people to accept themselves just as people. Like, everything has to be this extraordinary, you know, hero's tale and no one's allowed to just like be a person. So, so like, it makes people feel like if you're injured and you have this Achilles, uh, you know, time that you need to spend kind of just low key relaxing. There's this weird feel because of sort of internet culture in some way that it's like, well, if you aren't using that as a springboard to change your life, then you're a loser, you know? And it's like, no, it's also okay just to sit and do nothing and just

• 3:57Cory Allen?

  be a person and be all right for a minute, you know?

• 4:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's a function of seeing the highlight reel of everybody else, right? That

• 4:04Cory Allen?

  Totally, totally.

• 4:05Chris Williamson?

  Almost any incident is also a potential for content.

• 4:10Cory Allen?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

• 4:12Chris Williamson?

  So it's like, unless you're taking a selfie whilst the operation's going on and recording a podcast, and then it's got to be in the newsletter. And everyone just feels like a budget Gary Vee. So, yeah, I get that very, very much. So today I wanted to talk about, we've already had you on the show. You were episode like 12 and this is going to be 250 something. So everyone that wants to find out about your approaches for meditation, go back and listen to that. It was a fantastic episode. But today, your other, I guess, internet commodity that you, that you travel in, that you, you end up shipping is binaural beats. And it's something that myself and some of the other guys I regularly have on the show, we have played around with, we use, I know Johnny's a huge fan of Brain FM.

• 4:57Chris Williamson?

  He also uses some of your tracks as well to work to and to sleep to and for meditation. But I've never really heard anyone give a breakdown of what binaural beats are, why they exist, what their effects are, how they're made, all that stuff. So I wanted to, I wanted to get yourself in to kind of break down the fourth wall a little bit about it. So where do we begin?

• 5:20Cory Allen?

  Man, absolutely. Yeah, well, thanks for having me on and I'm happy to dive into it with you. Well, I think that beginning with just kind of defining some terms is useful because like meditation, dealing with anything that's sort of effervescent, you know, it's like, it's not a physical thing. So it's kind of, you know, conceptual, like audio is, is a bit harder to grasp for some people. So just sort of introducing what the binaural beats are. So first off, binaural means basically, you know, stereo. So monoral is like one single sound source. So if you think in your headphones or whatever, you've got a left and a right headphone.

• 6:04Cory Allen?

  That's, you know, left and right. So it's two by BI and then oral, you know, so two sound, you know, and a monoral would be a single mono signal, which is like an old record player or something that has like the horn, the gramophone player, where just the horn coming out, that's mono, that's one, you know, but also all like voice recordings are mono, you know. And for a bit of useless more detail, I will say that

• 6:33Cory Allen?

  in most mono sounds that you hear, you know, are then they're split to stereo. So it's the same thing coming through both speakers, but it's just, you know, it's still mono. Anyway, so then the beats, a part of binaural beats. So binaural is, you know, two audio signals and beats is beating. So in music, there's a phenomenon called beating. And that is whenever you have two audio frequencies, which of course all sound and music are all audio frequencies. Where if you have two audio frequencies that are close together, they vibrate because sound moves in waves. So if you think about all sound is like, it's physical, you know, so it's, it's moving through air.

• 7:16Cory Allen?

  So it's literally like, you just think of a wave going up and down and up and down. And it's literally just moving through air in a physical way. It's breaking through the air as it goes. And the speed of that vibration of the wave, so you know, something very, a deep sound like bass from, you know, like your slamming house track that we've mentioned earlier. But more particularly the bass line, that the deep, you know, bass line you would hear that's kind of hovering in the room during, you know, amongst the kick drum. That is a really, really slow moving waves wave.

• 7:58Cory Allen?

  And that's why whenever you're standing next to a subwoofer, you feel air coming through. It's because there's like so much force and it's so slow that it's literally like as the wave goes up and down, it's like that negative space is actually pushing, like physically pushing air through.

• 8:15Chris Williamson?

  Shit, is that, that's why it happens. I never realized that you can feel that whenever you put your hand in front of a, a little subwoofer you've got next to your TV, right?

• 8:25Cory Allen?

  Yeah, totally.

• 8:26Chris Williamson?

  It just does the little sort of, those puffs coming out.

• 8:29Cory Allen?

  Yeah. So it's literally like the sound wave is like pushing, it's, you know, moving the air out like that. So. Then if you, as you start to move upwards in frequencies, so this bass tone, let's move up to think of like something like a hi hat or even, you know, even higher. That's gonna be uh really fast. So it's gonna, the sound wave is gonna be moving really, really fast. And it's gonna look like kind of almost uh, you know, crinkled or something like that because it's moving so fast. And that's the high frequency, right? So uh, that's like, or even the highest note on a piano or something is, is super fast. So if you really think about it.

• 9:12Cory Allen?

  Um, like spinning something up, whatever it is, doesn't have to be sound or music or anything. If you, if, if you have uh, you know, something you spin it up, it gets faster, the pitch kind of naturally rises, you know, on anything like that. It's just the same property, the physical property that's happening in music and sound. So. Um, in, on, back to the piano, you think about the piano. Uh, so this beating thing, the notes on like a piano, for example, or a guitar are all very close to each other. Like the frequencies, the vibrations, they're very close. Uh, and so if you play like a white and a black key on a piano that are right next to each other. You think about that, you hear that sort of wobbling, that like ba, wa, wa, wa, that's the beating.

• 9:54Cory Allen?

  Because their frequencies are, are tuned individually, and one key is tuned to that note, key is tuned to, to this other note. But they're very close together because on a piano, of course, you start from the lowest note to the highest note, goes left to right. And they just kind of with each key, they're incrementally tuned a little, you know, a few. Uh, you know, hertz higher and higher and higher. And so you've got this nice uh, system that you can play on that sounds good. Um, but if you play two notes that are right next to each other that are, you know, minor and, and major. Then you're gonna hear that beating because they're. They're so close to each other that they're actually, those sound waves are kind of interfering with each other. So if you think about that up and down wave thing happening, well, now you've got two notes.

• 10:39Cory Allen?

  So you put two of those right next to each other and they're fighting for space in air. So you think about that subwoofer pushing the air out. So since all notes are moving through air, you've got these two notes that are kind of fighting for space. They're cycling at a similar speed and frequency. And so they're colliding. And so as they're colliding, that's what creates that wobbling sound. So again, on the piano, you hit two notes, a black and white key right next to each other. You hear that wobble. That's literally the two frequencies fighting for space. And that's what creates the beating because they're fighting in physical space, you know, for room. And so that's what creates that sound. That's called the beating.

• 11:20Cory Allen?

  So binaural beats is two, you know, basically one headphone in one ear, one in the other. And then beating is the idea of two frequencies creating that wobbling sound by being very close to each other and kind of fighting against each other. So that's just to define terms for binaural beats of just the actual terms. Now, the actual functional process of the tracks themselves. This is a bit more detailed, but I'll try and make it as succinct as possible. So the overall intended effect is to be able to listen to these tracks and change the way that you're feeling, change the way that you're thinking and the way that your mind is operating.

• 12:04Cory Allen?

  So you can, with intentionality of which track that you use, kind of coerce your brain into a different zone. So that would be either something relaxation, you know, creativity, extreme heightened perception and focus, sleep, meditation, just general kind of alertness, but still feeling calm. These kind of different states that we go in throughout the day. You know, wherever you sleep, you're obviously very relaxed. And wherever you're in the peak point of your day in the afternoon, you're drinking coffee, you've just worked out. That's where your brain is firing. You're not in the flow state per se, but you're like in the alpha beta range where you're really keyed up.

• 12:45Cory Allen?

  And then, you know, at a high performance level, flow state is like the highest level of the brain. Throughout the day, we move through all these different brainwave states. And those are really quickly, uh, delta, theta, alpha, beta, and gamma. So that's from lowest to highest. Um, now, uh, what's interesting is that then these, okay, so in our brains, the way that thoughts and these brainwave states are defined is basically our brain is a collection of neurons. It's a bunch of, uh, and you please stop me at any time if this is, if I'm getting

• 13:24Chris Williamson?

  No, please keep going. This is what we want to know.

• 13:26Cory Allen?

  Okay, again, I'm trying to cut it down as much as possible. So

• 13:29Chris Williamson?

  In fact, you're just trying to explain the single most complex object in the entire universe to us and how it relates with sounds that go into our ears.

• 13:37Cory Allen?

  Well, one of my favorite things about the brain is it spends its entire existence trying to make itself realize things, which is just really bizarre.

• 13:47Cory Allen?

  So anyway, uh, you know, so we, our brain is a collection of neurons and by, you know, our brain operates on electricity. And so the way we have thoughts or the whole subsystems and different areas of the brain work at all is that those neurons, they fire an electrical signal from one neuron to the next neuron upon a little road called a synapses. And that's basically the synapses connect our neurons together throughout the brain. And there's like, you know, a billion-ish or whatever, or two billion, a trillion, who knows? They're always raising that number of how many neurons are in the brain.

• 14:26Cory Allen?

  And so whenever we think there's a series of neurons fire electrical signals through our synapses to these other neurons and so on and so on, in different areas of the brain, kind of, uh, they fire to each other and it creates this interesting little dance. And those, the, the, the speed and frequencies of those electrical signals moving throughout the brain and the neurons firing are called brainwaves. So that's where we get the term brainwaves. This is literally like the same, just as you think of audio waves. It's like these rolling waves of electricity firing to the brain. And those are the brainwaves. So that's the dam, uh, delta, theta, alpha, beta, gamma is the brainwaves.

• 15:10Chris Williamson?

  So is it, would you be able to say that the brainwaves are like a, an aggregate of the individual firings moving in a particular pattern that commonly goes together?

• 15:19Cory Allen?

  Yes, exactly, exactly.

• 15:21Chris Williamson?

  Have we got it?

• 15:23Cory Allen?

  Right, right. Exactly. So, um, so the idea with, um, with binaural beats is to be able to try and affect what brainwave state that you're in on demand. And so the concept behind the actual audio tracks is to put one tone, one of those, those tones in one ear at a particular frequency. So in the left headphone, you're going to have one particular frequency. Then in the right headphone, you're going to have another particular frequency, just a tone that's going. Now, the difference in hertz between those two tones is going to be the same difference

• 16:07Cory Allen?

  of, of hertz that your, that the, um, the speed of a particular brainwave state operates at. So, okay, so like a, a, for example, for a theta state, whenever the electricity, the neurons are firing, it's moving through the brain, that's generally happening at the speed of four to eight hertz, somewhere in there-ish. Uh, and so whenever we get more excited, we get more, the brain can, gets more amped up, we're processing faster, then that speeds up to, you know, eight to 13 hertz or something like that. And it kind of continues to increase in these, these bands that they've labeled, uh, you know, these different things. So let's just make it really simple.

• 16:52Cory Allen?

  So we think of theta and let's call it four hertz, right? So our, we're, we're very relaxed, we're almost, this is almost like a meditative type of state that we're in with theta. We're super calm, uh, just kind of, uh, consciousness is very placid and open and everything. And so our brainwaves are firing signals slowly and calmly and think of four hertz. So it's just this very slow kind of boom, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. That's the the audio wave, the subwoofer in the brain moving up and down. So what we'd want to do to to replicate that with the binaural beat is to put one frequency in the left ear, let's call it 100 hertz.

• 17:37Cory Allen?

  So that's that's the tone. That's the kind of like the crispest part of a kick drum, just for any audio engineers out there, kind of 100 hertz.

• 17:48Cory Allen?

  Then in the other ear, the other headphone, we're going to put 104 hertz. So just making it plain and using the metric system, well, with 100 and then 104. So by putting 100 hertz in one ear, 104 hertz in the other ear, you think about what those two tones are doing whenever you listen to them together, right? They're creating the difference that four hertz, because they're so close, they create that beating or that wobbling type of sound, right? And so in that, creating of the four hertz vibration, the idea behind binaural beats is that then the brain, as it hears each of those tones in each ear, is trying to kind

• 18:31Cory Allen?

  of mathematically make up the difference between those two frequencies as it's hearing those individual audio tones. And in that, it entrains, that's why they call binaural beats, you know, brainwave entraining music. It's because it's then the theory is that it entrains the brain into that theta state. So the brainwaves start sort of replicating and sinking into the groove of the frequency that you're hearing. And then ideally, your your consciousness is then shifted into that particular brainwave state.

• 19:06Chris Williamson?

  Can we hear, can we hear something that is that particular theta, that that bottom end one?

• 19:13Cory Allen?

  Yeah, we'll draw, let's, let's play this, this track called Opening Eye. That's the track that's theta and we'll just play 30 seconds of that or something now.

• 19:50Cory Allen?

  Okay, and we're back, and I mean, I feel relaxed.

• 19:56Cory Allen?

  Um, yeah, so if you can hear in that track, you know, and there's other things going on. So we can hear the vibrating tones. But of course, um, in these tracks, of course, whenever you find these, you'll see that they're also accompanied by other musical elements to make them musical, to make them, uh, not just this technical sort of thing that's happening. And depending on the artist, you can really create a lot of emphasis. So sort of just the beating tones are sort of the bare minimum to get the function going. Also, as a side note, just to further illuminate the conceptual nature of this, uh, isochronic,

• 20:37Cory Allen?

  or it's a term for monophonic beating as well. So something that their particular objects have the propensity to beat on their own, even though they're just a single object because of their physical character. Well, like? A gong. So that's exactly where I'm going. So you think about whenever in a Buddhist temple, there's a giant gong there. And before they sit down to meditate, they hit that sucker and it goes.

• 21:06Cory Allen?

  Well, think about that sound. It's going.

• 21:10Cory Allen?

  It's the same thing. It's the exact same thing. So that's the beating, right? Um, so you can take just that, that raw functional nature of it. And then based upon the, you know, whatever the artist's, uh, talent or, or purposes, you can then really scale that up to make it much more nuanced and succinct and impactful. And so you'll add, and of course, priority one is listen to melody. So you have two tones, you can add some, people usually put kind of textural ambient sounds on top of them to kind of give it a further. Uh, relaxing sound and also in ambient music. One of the points there is that you don't want rhythmic moments plotted in time per se,

• 21:54Cory Allen?

  because you want it to be kind of off the grid. You don't want the listener to be, even if we're not doing it consciously, we subconsciously, when we listen to any music, pay attention to the rhythmic nature of things. And if we hear, you know, one rhythmic sound that we hear kick drum and then a snare, we're gonna expect to hear on the same beat, you know, in the same rhythm, another kick or snare and so on and so on. We expect that. Like, imagine if you had your favorite hip hop track on and every like seventh kick drum was missing. You'd probably pull a hamstring or something.

• 22:26Chris Williamson?

  Maybe that's how I did my Achilles. Maybe I was listening to something that was five to the floor or something.

• 22:33Cory Allen?

  Yeah, because you're expecting this thing and it doesn't happen and you're like, uh oh, you know? So we have this, uh, you know, this, and even in cinematic music, there's, you know, very slow paced rhythms. We still expect this resolution to happen musically. So anyway, so in binaural beats, there's not rhythmic elements commonly because of that. You want the listener to, uh, kind of lose track of time, as it were, to further sink into the actual effect of the thing. So musically, there's generally just kind of textual things. Some people use nature sounds and stuff. I, I, I use those sometimes. Um, but I, I also tend to use, on some of the tracks, I use my own,

• 23:16Cory Allen?

  uh, just kind of some, uh, vocal drones, but also a lot of other kind of electronic sounds and various things. Uh, and, and just to go a little bit into my tracks and, uh, if you'd like, I mean, I'm just kind of talking endlessly here, but please tell me any, at any point, if there's any, any direction I'm going to go, but.

• 23:35Chris Williamson?

  No, no, the only thing I was thinking before was that I imagine you could create a binaural beat without any of the extra elements to it. And it might perhaps have the desired effect, but be so unengaging that your thoughts might sort of drift off elsewhere. Without the, in opening eye, you've kind of got these symbols and this sort of stuff in the higher registers as well that keep it more interesting, I guess.

• 23:58Cory Allen?

  Yeah, yeah, and also just listening to the tones, yeah, would make someone feel like they're in like Space Odyssey 2001, you know, floating out. It's just, it would be very abstract and, and harder for people to relax into it because they're focusing on just this vibrating sound, you know. It is interesting how the musical quality works as a sort of obfuscation of the technical element in some way. So you sort of, you know, aren't really focused on that as much. You're listening to the top layer and the bottom layer is doing all the dirty work, you know.

• 24:30Chris Williamson?

  That's funny. You've Trojan, Trojan-horsed a really mindful music set in with something that sounds nice on top.

• 24:37Cory Allen?

  Yeah, that's right. That's right. And so in, in my tracks, you know, I've spent 20 years, you know, as an audio producer and my whole life, you know, also in that same time, being a, you know, a student of meditation and philosophy and studying consciousness, just all the neurosciences, cognitive sciences, you know, neuroscience, consciousness, psychology, philosophy of mind, et cetera, et cetera, and music at the same time. Those things are all, have always kind of woven into each other. They've been binaural beating my whole life, those two things. And so I, you know, in my music, it's always, the intentions have always been, something that fascinates me a lot is listener expectation,

• 25:22Cory Allen?

  the, the different things you can do musically, you know, harmonically with notes, the arrival, the tension and relief and expectation that people hear and kind of the, the emotions and feelings that arise through listening to different, you know, orchestrated melodies and, and sounds. Also, the way that you can make sounds arrive and depart in very, I call it kind of musical sleight of hand, where it's like, I have sounds that take, you know, in, in my Bono Beats, which are 30 minutes to an hour to two hours long, you know, some sounds will fade in for 10 minutes. It takes that long for it to go from silence to its peak volume.

• 26:06Cory Allen?

  And at the same time, other sounds are fading out for ten minutes. And so they're kind of cross fading and there's a lot of that happening all at once. And so before you even realize there's a change, you're already somewhere else. And then before you realize where you are, there's yet another change. And it's a real sneaky in particular way to keep people

• 26:30Cory Allen?

  from really paying attention to time, you know? And when you're timeless, where are you? You're in the present, right? And so by doing that, it's a way to kind of musically guide people to the present moment.

• 26:41Chris Williamson?

  There's an awful lot going on, man.

• 26:43Cory Allen?

  Yeah, there's a whole lot. Yeah, and I could, of course, nerd out on it very deeply. But also, I got really interested in Bino beats, sort of like in the like early 2000s. Because I was always, I've always been poking at my brain to see what happens. I'm just kind of use myself as a lab rat, you know? For all sorts of different chemicals and experiments and whatever.

• 27:11Cory Allen?

  But I, really what got me interested in them was reading some rather esoteric writings on Buddhism and kind of fringe meditation techniques and stuff way back in the early 2000s-ish. And maybe even right before that. But I remember, so one of the things I was reading was that these, some monks would sleep on the right side, on their right side if they wanted to have like a creative day the next day. And sleep on their left side if they wanted to have a more sort of systematic day. So the idea was that blood would saturate the right hemisphere of the brain or left hemisphere and so on. And I don't know how much efficacy is in that, that bit of thing.

• 27:53Cory Allen?

  But I'm sure the psychosomatically that you're sort of, it's a nice placebo effect. But I was reading things like that and I was trying that and that was interesting. And then I was also, I've always been fascinated with what particular frequencies, what they can do to the body, so the human body, that is. And so.

• 28:13Cory Allen?

  You know, if you play certain tones, like first off, if anyone doesn't think that tones can affect the body, let me remind you that there are weaponized audio devices that the military and and like kind of the militarized police use. They're basically these giant, well, not giant, not so giant, they're sort of look like, um, what is that, a dish, like a satellite dish? And uh, they play a really high pitched audio frequency that you can't even hear. Cause it's like above the range of human hearing, which is like around 20,000 hertz. And it's so it's above that, but it's super loud and above that. And it literally makes you pass out. Or in it or can cause extreme discomfort, headaches, disorientation.

• 28:58Chris Williamson?

  No way.

• 28:59Cory Allen?

  Because, yeah, yeah, you can basically fry someone's nervous system with super high frequencies. So.

• 29:04Chris Williamson?

  Are those legal? Are they Geneva Convention out or?

• 29:08Cory Allen?

  Yeah, they, they, they are in America anyway, but you know, this is kind of Wild West, so who knows?

• 29:14Chris Williamson?

  That's crazy. That's like the South Park episode where they try and find the brown note.

• 29:18Cory Allen?

  Yeah, exactly. Exactly. That would be so much more funny if they use that, if they could do that instead of.

• 29:25Chris Williamson?

  Make people poop their pants instead of.

• 29:27Cory Allen?

  Yeah.

• 29:28Chris Williamson?

  Passing out.

• 29:28Cory Allen?

  Yeah, totally. I mean, cause then at least it's hilarious.

• 29:31Chris Williamson?

  There's dogs in the nearby town when they're playing that thing going absolutely crazy, having a party.

• 29:36Cory Allen?

  Man, you know it. Yeah. Or wanting to, you know, crawl out of their, their fur. So, um, yeah, so you know, these, these sounds, you know, sounds really not only because they're just the physical nature of them, um, but also just the way that our, that our body holds resonance as well. So, you know, you, we like a kick drum, uh, a bass line makes it like Daft Punk makes anybody want to kind of move a little bit because of the bass is like literally, you know, it's, it's hitting your, uh, there's a lot of research that shows that like the bass frequencies in the rhythm of like dance tracks, the reason why those rhythms and those temp, those BPMs is like beats per minute make you want to dance. One of them is because they're like higher than the rate of resting heart rate.

• 30:20Cory Allen?

  So if it's a little bit higher than your heart rate, it makes you want to kind of match that tempo. You know, if you listen to something relaxing, this some samba or something like that, it's like 60 beat beats per minute, you know, or whatever, it's super relaxed.

• 30:33Chris Williamson?

  Can you explain why Cardi B's WAP is done at 70 beats per minute then?

• 30:40Cory Allen?

  Well, that's maybe you should like put watch some porn and then we'll see if the rhythms in that match the rhythms in the in this in the track.

• 30:49Chris Williamson?

  Fucking WAP, man. Yeah, I um, I always noticed that one of the things I DJed for a short while when I was younger and even now I can tell the difference between a DJ who's playing it sort of 125, 126 and 128, 129, uh, 128 being sort of the classic, I guess, dance rhythm, the pacing.

• 31:12Cory Allen?

  Right.

• 31:12Chris Williamson?

  And um, I went to go and see Ben Boma from Anjunadeep on the beach at Dubai while I was out there and the sun's setting over the horizon and he's playing at like 123 and it's just so cool, super chill.

• 31:27Cory Allen?

  Yeah.

• 31:28Chris Williamson?

  Um, it was beautiful and that insight, I even remember thinking back then, I was like, this is so slow, but he's managed to get it right. So even that, that particular rhythm, if he'd been playing those tracks pitched up to 128 or 129, it would have given a very different sort of sensation. And I suppose that we're talking here about gradations of how music has an effect on us, right?

• 31:52Cory Allen?

  Right.

• 31:52Chris Williamson?

  Like Cardi B's WAP had a different effect on me to the, the music of Anjunadeep being played at sunset and the rhythm is a part of that as are obviously the lyrics, as is the kick drum and all the rest of it. But before we go on, let's, let's play another one, man. What, what should we listen to next?

• 32:10Cory Allen?

  Yeah, sure. So this one, uh, let's go with, uh, this is kind of my personal favorite is one called Luminosity. And this track is, uh, I had so many people over the years, we're kind of going out of order here and just in the biography and kind of the reason of all these exist. But over the years, I had a lot of people hit me up asking me to make tracks for like psychedelic journeys or for, you know, like extended meditation retreats or something like that. Basically how to get into that deep, deep part of the mind and really have some, some scaffolding and guidance there. And so for just rather sort of.

• 32:55Cory Allen?

  Uh, I would call them ethical reasons. I, I didn't call them like music for psychedelics or whatever. Yeah, yeah, because one, I, I think it's a little corny and also I never, you know, just kind of philosophically, I never want to be instructing people to do things or anything at all, much less, you know, uh, trying to, you know, influencing people. So people do what you want, you know, but, uh, anyway, so it's called music for deep work is the collection. And, you know, and also it doesn't, uh, it, you know, I think we, we can do deep work in a lot of ways, you know, with or without chemicals and it's important to highlight that as well. So, uh, this is one of those tracks and it's luminous.

• 34:04Cory Allen?

  Okay. So, um, yeah, you can hear that track has more pronounced kind of musical qualities to it that are still sparse and stretched out. Uh, but it, it is going in that, uh, that theta range, you know, to keep, to get in that deep kind of, uh, creativity, very, very calm, relaxed, uh, type of zone. And I, some of the tracks, this one, uh, being one of those, I get a little tricky with them because I will take it from one brainwave state and slide down slowly over the course of the track sometimes because people are already kind of keyed up as humans anyway. They're already kind of dialed up to, and

• 34:49Cory Allen?

  like tense and weird and fidgety and just stressed. And, you know, we all are over, overly stimulated and over saturated. So kind of starting from one place and then slowly have them sort of like sinking down into the sand, like as it goes on. Um, which I don't know if I've ever mentioned that publicly, that I do that sometimes before.

• 35:07Chris Williamson?

  Cheeky, cheeky, cheeky, sorry. But it's kind of like frog in boiling water type.

• 35:12Cory Allen?

  Yes, exactly. Except for it's a hot tub, not a boiling.

• 35:17Chris Williamson?

  Hot tub to cool, cool bath. Yeah, exactly.

• 35:20Cory Allen?

  Yeah.

• 35:22Cory Allen?

  Yeah, yeah. So, um, so anyway, so sounds affect the body. And I've been really fascinated with that, you know, over my life. And there's a lot of research out there, some weirdo fringe, you know, stuff, some actually academic, over what particular tones can affect the body in what ways. And there's like, I mean, I have a huge archive of research from over, as I said earlier, you know, the time that I was in my early twenties or late teens, early twenties, I got interested in this in the 2000, around the year 2000. And I just started like researching and reading and collecting these different things. And I would, I'd make these audio tracks with different frequencies to kind of see how they made me and other people feel.

• 36:04Cory Allen?

  And it just kind of, my interest in that evolved from there. So I did make some Bino Beat tracks back then. And then I guess probably five or six years ago, what was funny is that my friend Aubrey hit me up and was like, hey, I've been, I want to try Bino Beats, you know, I've heard that they're really awesome. But do you think, like, have you ever made any? And I was like, yeah, you know, like, I don't know, 15 years ago. And he's like, would you break down some? And I was like, yeah, sure, sure. So I made some. And I was just like, just making them to make them. And then I let him listen to them. And he was just like, dude, what the fuck is this? This is crazy. You know, these, like, this is like, like, what's

• 36:49Cory Allen?

  happening here? And so in the course of me making them, you know, the last, the 15 years of compositional experience and music production experience all culminated in meditation, you know, just familiarity with consciousness. And that ultimately also the awareness of the texture of my own mind in any given moment, you know, I think, becoming acutely aware of that became very valuable in making these tracks. And it's why they have kind of the, or one of the reasons why they have kind of the magical quality that they do, is because through, you know, 20 years of meditation, I've gotten to where I'm very aware of like,

• 37:31Cory Allen?

  how my consciousness is shifting in the moment, where it's at, like, as I said, you know, the texture of mind. And I also am aware of when that's being changed and influenced. And so in the creation of the tracks, I put a lot of detail, a lot of interesting little, you know, tricky things in there like I mentioned to you. And I'm kind of tuning them all musically, rhythmically, the actual frequencies themselves, until I feel that flow state shift in my own consciousness. And it's not even necessarily like, it's not like a mixing issue or a, you know, a spatial issue or particularly a harmonic issue.

• 38:14Cory Allen?

  It's more of just listening and getting like the kind of the palette set and then adding and moving everything until, whatever way necessary, until I feel that shift with them myself. And whenever I feel that flow kind of like hyper presence portal open and dilate, I'm like, I got it. There it is. And so that's sort of why all of these tracks have that quality to them is because I'm literally like tuning them to my own mind until I feel them like, turn the key, you know, and when they turn the key, I'm like, there it is. Now it's just a matter of finishing it off.

• 38:47Chris Williamson?

  Is it a different way to create a two hour long binaural beat track that you're aiming to resonate with your mind in a particular way? Like if you're sat in the mixing studio, I imagine you must need to get yourself in quite a different places if you're mastering down a hip hop track or something.

• 39:02Cory Allen?

  No, I mean, what's funny about that is that over, I don't know, I've gotten to where over the years, I'm very, I'm kind of like a surgeon with music. I got, it's not that I'm not clinical. It's not that I'm clinical about it in the sense that I don't have any feeling or care, but I'm very removed from like being influenced by whatever I'm listening to generally. I try and, it's because I sort of like want to remain objective in the process and not get like swept up in. It's strange. It's one of the confusing things about Buddhism as well. This will talk about cultivating a dispassion for everything, even for pleasure.

• 39:45Cory Allen?

  And people are like, why would I want to not want to feel pleasure? You know, it doesn't make any sense, but kind of articulating that further. It's like, oh, well, you want to, you can enjoy the pleasure, but you don't want to crave and desire and to want the pleasure, or else it has control over you and it becomes a point of suffering. Because whenever that thing fleets, as all things do, then you have a void and you seek this pleasure again. You have the passion for the pleasure, you go look for it, and you begin to suffer, and then that kind of daisy chains on with all of the elements of suffering. So by cultivating a spacious dispassion for pleasure, then when a pleasure comes, you can deeply enjoy it and receive it,

• 40:27Cory Allen?

  but still not be addicted and have the craving that creates the suffering. That's kind of how I look at music production. It's like, I have a dispassion for it in the sense that I'm here, I receive it when it's happening. I do instinctively and intellectually what I know needs to happen to it, but don't get caught up in all of the human stuff with it.

• 40:50Chris Williamson?

  I'm absolutely adamant that Cardi B felt the same way when she was recording the lyrics to and Megan Thee Stallion, she was very, very famous for her principle of non-attachment.

• 41:02Cory Allen?

  Yeah, she's, well, that track had quite an effect on you.

• 41:08Chris Williamson?

  I'm absolutely blown away by it, man. I find that track particularly, and then the associated social media furor that came out after it, to just be fascinating. And that's a whole nother discussion that I think we could get into.

• 41:24Cory Allen?

  It's a great track, and Megan Thee Stallion is amazing. Her new album is, I don't know if you've heard of her album that came out last Friday, but yeah, I recommend that.

• 41:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so next, what have we got next? Let's play another song. We've got, uh, we've played the luminosity in opening eye. What else we got?

• 41:40Cory Allen?

  Yeah, yeah. So I'll, I'll, we'll go into a yet another direction. Uh, I'll just wrap up that what I was talking about, uh, uh, real quickly. And that is, you know, so I gave these tracks to Aubrey and he listened to them and was like, man, this is amazing. And so as we kind of talked about him a little bit further, we're like, you know, he's like, maybe, uh, maybe we should like offer these to people. We could sell them, put them on his website. This is before I even had like the store on my website. He said, we could put them on my website and see, see who digs them. And so I did a, you know, we did some podcasts, we talked about them and they just like the response was just crazy. It was like,

• 42:18Cory Allen?

  I never would have anticipated the amount of feedback and like response and, and stuff that listeners had to, to the binary of beats. It started where I just, I think it's kind of since then, I've never not got a message, uh, you know, a day without someone saying, dude, I love these are, I listen to these every day. Thank you. You know?

• 42:37Chris Williamson?

  What's the most common usage that you've found people use them for?

• 42:42Cory Allen?

  I think two things, either meditation or for focus. So we'll get to the focus thing right after this. Um, and so, yeah, man, uh, it was really fascinating. I ended up licensing those to Onnit, you know, and so that was, that was cool. Like they became a, you know, a nice, uh, kind of fixture within the, the Onnit, you know, world and expand out from there. And then they just kind of continued in my own way to like, you know, okay, well I made those, let me continue on to the different, you know, intentional purposes of each one that people are hitting me up and asking for. And also, uh, I'm constantly, my curiosity and didn't drive to kind of.

• 43:24Cory Allen?

  Uh, I don't know, I guess improve upon a craft and like hone in something just as natural. And so I'm always like, well, let's see if I can, how powerful and potent can I make these?

• 43:36Chris Williamson?

  Dude, I mean, I, I, I still say that the release into now meditation series that you did, which will be linked in the show notes below, is still my favorite guided meditation for anyone who wants to take it to the next level. It's, i- i- in my opinion, it's a, it's a big ask for a beginner, um, because the sessions are like half an hour. But if you've spent a little bit of time and you've built up a, a base level of a habit, like that thing just super over the space of six weeks, just totally supercharges your, there's not a single person that I've said, you need to go and get this to kind of level up your meditation game. And they haven't come back and gone like, what the fuck was that?

• 44:14Cory Allen?

  Oh, man, that's awesome to hear. Thank you. Thank you.

• 44:16Chris Williamson?

  One of my, one of my buddies did it. Um, and I think he, he really struggled for the first few, this is a compliment, I think. Um, but he struggled for the first few days to stay awake, um, during them. And he found himself just immediately going to sleep, even if he'd slept perfectly fine the week before. This is also a friend, uh, to whom I sent Sam Harris explaining determinism and our lack of free will. Uh, and it sent him into a two week spiral of depression. So I've done quite a lot, I've done quite a lot to this friend over the last year. So Luke, I want to apologize to you again, buddy. I didn't mean to.

• 44:47Cory Allen?

  Also, man, Luke, check out compatibilism. That's another, that's maybe that'll settle better with you.

• 44:53Chris Williamson?

  That is the antidote.

• 44:54Cory Allen?

  Yeah.

• 44:54Chris Williamson?

  Um, oh, there's a, sorry, I'll interject there, man. There's a, a recent Daniel Dennett paper that he just published on expanding free will. Have you seen this?

• 45:04Cory Allen?

  No.

• 45:05Chris Williamson?

  I'll send it to you. I'll send it to you once I'm done. And anyone that wants to, to read it, it's available for free. If you just search expanding free will, Daniel Dennett on Google, really like fascinating study. I was reading that sleep deprived on the way back from Dubai. And that made for like, that was the visual equivalent of binaural beats, I think. Cause I'm reading this, these words and I'm trying to work out what the hell is going on.

• 45:25Chris Williamson?

  But yeah, man, releasing to now, like I say, anybody that wants to kind of really up level their meditation game, just go and do that over the space of six weeks, you will, uh, you will change an awful lot about how you see meditation, I think.

• 45:38Cory Allen?

  Oh, well, thank you, man. Thank you. It's it's interesting is that again, I made that, you know, five, six years ago, and people still, you know, are, you know, supporting it and very interested and they're always coming to it, you know. And it's interesting to me, I actually went back and listened to some of it because I was like, well, it's been five years. Like, you know, that was my first attempt at ever like teaching anything. And so I was just like, I hope it still holds up. And it was kind of refreshing. I clicked through some of it. And I was like, ah, okay, it's still pretty solid.

• 46:08Chris Williamson?

  Embarrassed about that old, old work.

• 46:11Cory Allen?

  Yeah. Also, as a funny side note on Daniel Dennett, I've been, his book Consciousness Explained, I got in the late 90s, I think. And that was a big impact on me whenever I was a teenager. And I really liked that one. And I actually emailed Tufts University whenever I was like 19, 20 or something, and asked if I could come be a free, like an intern or assistant for Daniel Dennett. And yeah, they didn't reply. But it's been, but.

• 46:40Chris Williamson?

  Little did Daniel Dennett know that he'd just turned down the opportunity to get free binaural beats for life.

• 46:45Cory Allen?

  Exactly, exactly. I think he's more interested in sailing and hanging out on the coast.

• 46:51Chris Williamson?

  Interesting dude. So one of the things I've noticed is that the two, the area, the two areas that you mentioned were deep focus and meditation. So quite mindful, quite open, quite present. But you mentioned that we've got these higher, higher ranges as well that we go into in terms of frequencies. Is that something that you just don't think people really need? Or that is it something that you actively tend to avoid in terms of creating binaural beats?

• 47:18Cory Allen?

  No, no, it's, it's an important one. It's one of the most popular. So that's what, it's a good primer to move into the next thing. And so. A lot of, I guess, a lot of the work I do generally through the meditation course or my podcast, or, you know, the music, a lot of it is about trying to get people to calm down. You know what I mean? Calm down, relax, be present, and sort of wake up to their own awareness. That's what a lot of my stuff does. So, also, the other, the counterpoint to that, the balance to that, is the extreme focus, the flow state, the gamma state. So, the gamma state is the highest state, you know, it's, is, you know,

• 47:59Cory Allen?

  heightened perception, flow, kind of, existence, mind. And so, yes, that is a very, a lot faster of a vibration. That's generally, you know, forty to sixty hertz. Some people clock it at about a hundred. But I think that forty to, forty-ish to sixty-ish is right. Just in a way that I've felt, whenever I've experimented with them. So, on the first set of Binner Beat I made, which I mentioned to you, that I, I shared with Aubrey, there was a track on there called Gamma Flow, and that was like, basically, you know, it's pretty self-explanatory, but it was meant to be like, the, you know, kind of, that was a collection, you know, so that you get all sorts of different tracks in that, that

• 48:42Cory Allen?

  collection, and that was the flow state track. And that one, I think, has been one of the most popular of all of, all time, because it's really, apparently, has had a profound effect on listeners, helping them get into their, their concentration state and their flow state. And the amount of people that have emailed me over the years that have said, hey, I wrote my entire book to this, I wrote my PhD. Yeah. Like, I listened to this on repeat. People have sent me like screenshots of their, their Apple, like, not, you know, on iTunes, like the amount played, like the play count. You know, here's Gamma Flow, played, you know, two hundred and thirty times. I'm like, two hundred and thirty times? That track's half an hour long. You know? And then, like, yeah, I listened to

• 49:25Cory Allen?

  it for a year on repeat while I was finishing my PhD thesis or whatever. And it's just like, endless, endless, yeah. And so, that track, people really, really like for flow state. And, yeah, so there's that one. And then, after that, because people dug that so much, I ended up making the second volume of Binner Beat I released with Aubrey, are all flow state tracks. So, it's four different flow state tracks. So we can play some of Gamma Flow right now.

• 49:56Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 50:27Cory Allen?

  All right, so that's that one. Yeah, and it's pretty minimal and spacious, but you can probably feel that flow happening. And, you know, these are, of course, you know, 30-second dish samples that we're playing here. And the reason the tracks are so long is that, you know, in general, in play length, from 30 minutes to two hours is because the idea is, you know, the kind of longer you listen to it, the longer your brain, you know, has the longer time has to kind of sink into it, get into the zone. I think that generally they say it's about, you know, at least kind of two to four, five minutes to really enter

• 51:08Cory Allen?

  the, open the door, you know. And there it's another kind of five minutes to get further into, sort of like meditation, you know, further into it, and then so on and so on. And once you kind of hit the 10 to 20 minute mark, you're really sailing.

• 51:21Chris Williamson?

  What's the, it's like a whooshing sort of air wind sound in that Gamma Flow track. What's that?

• 51:29Cory Allen?

  Yeah. Oh, that's, that's kind of, that's meant as a, the stereo effect to really confuse time. So, and it actually is a recording of air that I took. It's like a coast recording of the waves.

• 51:47Chris Williamson?

  I was gonna say, how do you record that?

• 51:49Cory Allen?

  Yeah, very sneakily, very, very quiet.

• 51:53Chris Williamson?

  Gonna creep up on it, right? Because it's vigilant.

• 51:55Cory Allen?

  Real quiet, quiet room and a powerful microphone. You ever, speaking of that, as a side note, you ever heard of an anechoic chamber before?

• 52:05Chris Williamson?

  Yes, but I can't remember what it is.

• 52:07Cory Allen?

  It's like a sound, soundless room. So there's basically, it's designed inside to where there's no reflections. So basically, whenever we hear sound, we're generally hearing the reflections of sound, not the actual sound itself. So if you're in a room and you talk, you're not really hearing your voice. You're hearing your voice bounce off the wall behind you and off the ceiling and off the floor and so forth. Uh, but in one of the, that's why music studios have sound absorption and, you know, panels because you know, it's to break those reflections and those resonances. So the, the microphone can actually record the source instead of the, the sound of the room. Also, interestingly enough, since we're in a, a sound wormhole, every space has its own frequency.

• 52:48Cory Allen?

  So the, uh, the square footage of a room and the materials the room is made out of, like the, the area of the room, it itself has a tone. So if you're, when you're talking in your room, the, the width and length and height of the room itself, and as I said, the, the material of the wall, so how the reflections are coming, actually have its own tone. So if you, you speak in one room, it's gonna, there's a different kind of passenger in there with you. And that's why auditoriums and music halls are very precisely, you know, designed so that they don't have that, or they mainly they have an amplifying effect, but no real resonant effect.

• 53:32Chris Williamson?

  I remember once in one of the nightclubs that we were working out of, it had a huge back wall. So you can imagine it's got this high, high ceiling and then halfway down the room, this high ceiling chops down into a low ceiling that continues to go. And the speakers at the front were throwing toward the back. And upon refurb, the guys, the builders had taken down this huge frame. It was like a image sort of poster, kind of like a poster, like a thick poster at the back on this main back wall. And they'd taken those down and the guys sound checked and threw the speakers back on in this new configuration. And it sounded so quiet, like they were blasting these speakers to hell and it sounded super, super quiet.

• 54:14Chris Williamson?

  And what we realized was that that back wall, the painting poster thing had actually been a bunch of conical, uh, sound absorbers. And what you were getting was the sound being thrown from the front, hitting itself on the way back from the wall and getting almost completely zeroed out. Which was insane. You could turn it up super, super loud and it would just sound like nothing because the sound hit the back wall, hit itself and then just killed it.

• 54:41Cory Allen?

  Yeah, that's like a low frequency oscillator, like an LFO. You'll see that on synthesizers or even like a wah pedal, like for guitar, like Jimi Hendrix, you know, that's like an LFO. So it's like creating a subsonic sound that actually, so subsonic sounds are frequencies that are below even like, you know, human hearing, like way below, it's the term subsonic. And they're so deep and, you know, the wave is so big that it pushes every, like, sounds out of the air. And so with a wah pedal, that's why it sounds wah wah whenever you move the pedal is because it's literally creating like a break, you know, in the actual sound or even like a tremolo effect when you hear something going like, like statically, that's

• 55:26Cory Allen?

  because it's just like, literally, there's a subsonic frequency pushing out all of the audio there in a rhythmic way. It's like just blasting it out. So it cancels it out.

• 55:36Chris Williamson?

  There's a club in Glasgow called the Sub Club and that has a subsonic dance floor. So it's got subsonic speakers built into the actual dance floor itself. So when you have bass tones that come through that, you feel it through your feet.

• 55:52Cory Allen?

  Nice. That's awesome. That's like, that would drive elephants mad. You know, they, elephants, they can send, I read something sometime, is it they can like hear each other from miles away because, you know, bass travels, obviously. And they can send like sounds that are so deep that the bass will just travel like a mile or something. And of course they got big ass ears. And so that, I just think it's so interesting for an animal. It's of course their size and like their resonance, they're just, they're a big ol', that's a big double bass right there, but like. Just an animal being able to send that deep of a bass sound is such a peculiar. It's like, what if you could emit a subwoofer sound from your body?

• 56:37Chris Williamson?

  Upon demand.

• 56:38Cory Allen?

  Yeah, that's like kind of what they're doing. It's sort of, sort of wild.

• 56:41Chris Williamson?

  Some of the blue whale noises and stuff as well, those can go for absolutely. I know obviously that sound conduction in water is significantly better than it is through air.

• 56:49Cory Allen?

  Totally.

• 56:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that goes for forever, right?

• 56:52Cory Allen?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, okay. So I don't remember where we were really. Um, I remember talking about.

• 56:58Chris Williamson?

  Gamma flow. We did that one.

• 56:59Cory Allen?

  Yeah. All right. So yeah, we did that one. Um, and uh, yeah, so that's a really great one. Your people, people would dig that in the second collection was for, you know, all for flow. And so since then, um, I've mainly created tracks that are for, you know, meditation, for relaxation, for, you know, the, the deep work and so on. And uh,

• 57:25Cory Allen?

  I think that, you know, moving on to perhaps the, the last piece is one for sleep. So that's another thing that people hit me up so much about. And I got so many messages of people saying like, hey, you know, I've been, been working, like, uh, this is pre, uh, lockdown times, but people are saying like, I've been working 10 hours a day and going to, you know, like university at nighttime and I have two kids. And I'm like on the verge of just a mental breakdown and like, I'm so fried and freaked out by the end of the day. I can't sleep. And the only thing I've been able to sleep is someone hooked me up with one of your tracks. And this has been helping me like deescalate and get to sleep at night. So just thank you, whatever. I have gotten that message, you know, like a hundred times.

• 58:11Cory Allen?

  And it made me realize like, okay, people need something for sleep. And then, you know, of course, as tends to happen in this weird world, as I started thinking about that, of course, I started having people message me requesting like, hey, you ever thought about making tracks for sleep? Yeah. Okay. That's clear. What is next? Um, and so I made, yeah, I made the, the next, the tracks for sleep. Uh, and these are really deep. These are Delta tracks. So these are, you know, to guide the, the mind, literally to like dreamless sleep. Uh, uh, complete like lack, lack of body awareness type of zone. And obviously people aren't going to be sleeping with headphones in most times. Um, but I made the tracks like two hours long.

• 58:56Cory Allen?

  So the idea is that you can, you get in bed, you know, and then you start listening to one of these. You maybe you're reading or something like that. And then in that hour that you're kind of like chilling out before you actually try and sleep, you're already listening to that, getting into the zone. And then, you know, once you, you turn the, the lights off and probably take the headphones off, then you're going to be like right there. So it can help you. It's kind of like a sleep primer is how I.

• 59:22Chris Williamson?

  Pre-workout.

• 59:22Cory Allen?

  But, but the, but there's a lot of, uh, it's interesting. There, there are actually a lot of people out there that do use like there's headbands with like, uh, ear, earbuds built in.

• 59:32Chris Williamson?

  Muse, the guys who do that portable E K E G E K G, the brain sensing headband for meditation. So I just got popped by one of their ads, uh, the other day. And they've created something that must track your brainwaves or your, your brain states while you sleep.

• 59:52Cory Allen?

  Yeah, that's their, I, I talked, I know Ariel Garten, the founder of Muse. And she was telling me a while back, like last year, that was their next product. So it's cool that it's, it's out.

• 1:00:04Chris Williamson?

  It's come to market, man. I've seen it. But yeah, you totally right. The, the world for, for this stuff.

• 1:00:11Chris Williamson?

  There's state app, which is by Brian McKenzie, which is a breath, breath work, um, application. And then there's silent mode, which is a face mask with inbuilt headphones and a accompanying music to do breath work to. And then there's wearables like Muse that were originally for seated meditation with audio feedback. And now we're going into brain tracking whilst you're asleep. And like the wearables market is just that it's going in all directions at once.

• 1:00:45Cory Allen?

  Yeah, yeah, it's funny. It's I actually don't like any of that stuff. People that they send them to me, but I'm just sort of just like, I don't need another like band to strap on.

• 1:00:56Chris Williamson?

  I keep, don't use the word strap on.

• 1:01:03Cory Allen?

  Got so many.

• 1:01:03Chris Williamson?

  I have three already. Um, yeah, I'm being honest, man. I've I've struggled with with pretty much everything that I've tried. I keep my whoop strap on as an activity tracker. But uh, we were talking about this while I was away. It really doesn't feel like anyone's kind of captured the wearables market in the same way. If you think about the kind of leap that Apple had with the iPhone and just how much of a chasm there was between that device and everything else that's before it. And I don't think we've had that yet with wearables. You've got the Apple Watch. But a perfect example of this Rory Sutherland, uh, modern wisdom, regular modern wisdom guest. He suggested that he thinks if Steve Jobs was still around, the Apple Watch wouldn't be made.

• 1:01:48Chris Williamson?

  He thinks it's too complex, too unintuitive, too highly priced and too user inefficient. And I'd never heard it before, but I actually thought, yeah, do you know what it is? I I buy everything from Apple. Like they bring something out. I upgrade my laptop. I upgrade my phone fairly regularly. I've never had any desire to buy an Apple Watch and I think he might be right with that. And the the idea of wearables is right, but I think the execution thus far, pretty much industry wide, is just a bit lacking.

• 1:02:16Cory Allen?

  Yeah, I agree. I'm not. I'm not a fan. And I mean, I have an Apple Watch, uh, but I I'm not like.

• 1:02:23Chris Williamson?

  Begrudging now.

• 1:02:25Cory Allen?

  Yeah. Yeah, I like it. I only wear it whenever I go out or, you know, go running or something like that. But I'm just don't care about like data, you know, like I just, I know every to each their own, of course, and for some people it's very useful. But to me, uh, there was like, uh, there's a show Schitt's Creek. I don't know if you've ever seen that. It's quite funny, but Dan Levy is like going on a hike with his his boyfriend and. He's like, oh, my, my Apple Watch is dead or whatever. And he's like, there's no point in even hiking. If it's not like, if I'm not getting the track and like, I don't care.

• 1:03:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, we'll do it again tomorrow. Did you see? So one thing that I will say that was a fairly big game changer is for me, knowing how much time I've been asleep. I'm aware that there's a margin of error here, but the waking up on a morning and being able to look and know that I got seven hours of sleep or seven and a half or eight or eight and a half or five. As opposed to the old world before wearables, which was just going to bed at a time and then waking up at a time and not really knowing. That that has definitely informed my, the way that I operate a lot, a lot more effectively.

• 1:03:40Chris Williamson?

  And I can compensate for sleep debt and kind of play around with things. But you're right. If you're not drilling into the data. I think a lot of devices, almost all of them, put out so much more than you need. And then unless you act on the data that you get from a wearable. Like, what's, what's the purpose of it? It's just like this masturbatory game of producing data for the sake of indexing it.

• 1:04:04Cory Allen?

  Exactly, exactly, man. Yeah, it's further distraction in my opinion, in a lot of cases, again, for me, but you know, some people, I'm sure it's incredibly useful. I have had a lot of people send me, speaking of, you know, things like Muse and I think Whoop has some similar data. Just showing your, you know, neural feedback or also your, your, your kind of real time heart rate or whatever change. These people have sent me screenshots where they're like, man, this is before, like this is a six month kind of like a shot here of before I started listening to, you know, you're using your meditation course with your binaural beats.

• 1:04:47Cory Allen?

  And then after, and like, look at the difference. And it's been like, it's crazy when people send them to me. I should actually, I'm trying to ask if I should put those on my site or something. But they like, it's just like a complete, like, you know. Inverse, it's like a total difference. It's really, really cool to see.

• 1:05:03Chris Williamson?

  That's crazy. I've got a Joel Jamison from Eight Weeks Out. He works with a lot of UFC fighters, getting them down to the right weight, but he's also one of the world experts in HRV training, literally probably number one on the planet. And I've got him on the show later this month and I'm going to bring up the binaural beat stuff with him because him affecting people's HRV in a appropriate way is pretty much what he spends his time doing. And HRV is an indicator of relaxation. Inversely, you want a high HRV and a low resting heart rate optimally. But yeah, that's, that's definitely one of them. And when you think about what most of the recovery strategies for athletes are doing, what they're trying

• 1:05:46Chris Williamson?

  to get them to do is just get into a parasympathetic state.

• 1:05:49Cory Allen?

  Right.

• 1:05:50Chris Williamson?

  Any, anyhow, is it by massage? Is it by going on a recovery walk in nature? Like, is it by sleeping more, whatever it might be, just trying to get that HRV up and that resting heart rate down? So yeah, man, I think, I tell you what, why don't we, why don't we listen to, it'll be Into the Void?

• 1:06:10Cory Allen?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:06:11Chris Williamson?

  Is that the sleep one?

• 1:06:12Cory Allen?

  No, that was Lunar Flow.

• 1:06:14Chris Williamson?

  Oh, well, you're messing me up with the names now. Why don't we listen to Lunar Flow?

• 1:06:49Cory Allen?

  Okay. And so then now also, I think we're in the same, a good neighborhood. And of course, time is shrinking here. So we can move into Into the Void, which that is also another deep Delta track as well. So it's kind of a good companion. This is from the first collection way back when. But I think this is the one, I think Aubrey has called the dry float. He's like, it's like being in a float tank, but not in the tank. So this is the end of the void track.

• 1:07:52Cory Allen?

  Okay, and then coming out of that one, I think just, you know, with a few minutes remaining, touching quickly on some of the research around this stuff is important because, you know, some people are willing to just try a Bino Beach or something and see if it works for them. And they're like, okay, cool. I like this and it makes me feel a certain way. Some people are a bit resistant to it because they're like, okay, this is, you know, a little skepticism, which I think is healthy. Ultimately, at the end of the day, I say with anything like that, you know, just give it a shot. And if it, if it works for you, then cool. If not, then, then that's cool too. But there, there is a lot of research and increasingly so in, over the last few years even,

• 1:08:36Cory Allen?

  they've become very popular and for treating anxiety and different traumas and kind of going through traumas and things like that, but really for treating anxiety and trying to get people out of their, even in a clinical state of, of dealing with anxiety. So one case in particular that I enjoyed, I was actually a part of, was a research team in Australia, in one of the universities, two, actually two, which unfortunately now I can't recall which one it was because it's been a year or two since I worked with them, but. Um, one, one of the major ones. And so they had a, a neuroscientist there that uh was

• 1:09:18Cory Allen?

  basically playing my tracks and I created some actually test tracks. So they could use um kind of a control uh study thing going on. So some of the

• 1:09:29Chris Williamson?

  Did you make a binaural beat that wasn't a binaural beat?

• 1:09:32Cory Allen?

  Yes, yes. So I made one with just the musical elements and then one with musical elements and the tones. So they had like a controlled track going on. So they would put people in there, mainly people that were, you know, struggling from psychological issues, you know, or anxieties, whatever it might be, put them in the fMRI scanner, which is just kind of a, the brainwave uh reading machine, we'll call it that. And they would then monitor kind of how their mind was reacting and how their heart rate was reacting to it. And they showed, you know, very clear success uh through that brain imaging that the track with the tones was affecting, you know, the brain and the way it was supposed to, since

• 1:10:14Cory Allen?

  creating relaxation, slowing down the brainwave padding, patterings in the firing of neurons. Uh, so it's very, very fascinating. I think that there, a lot of them in the academic sense have been used for, or have been getting a lot more traction for use in uh, in therapy sessions and stuff like that. And just general overall kind of wellness for people who are suffering psychologically and just kind of getting that recovery in.

• 1:10:38Chris Williamson?

  That's the, I guess, the acute state change. Um, have we had a look, have you had any research to do with the trait change, other than

• 1:10:47Cory Allen?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:10:48Chris Williamson?

  People sending you their heart rates

• 1:10:50Cory Allen?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:51Chris Williamson?

  steadily decreasing over a six month period.

• 1:10:54Cory Allen?

  Yeah, there, there have been several studies of, you know, uh, selections of people who have kind of been interviewed and, and taken readings and, and different data points and so forth on their, what kind of resting levels of stress and And anxiety and whatever and and then kind of use the tracks of her course of time and then gone back and gone in for, you know, more testing and monitoring and so forth and shown improvements and a reduction. They're all they're all based on anxiety. I think that's where you can get the funding for studies like that. Improvements on the reductions of of their anxiety and kind of their resting heart rates and things like that. So, yeah, it's it's all it's all interesting. Yeah, and I like reading about those things now now and again, but I think for me, for stuff like that.

• 1:11:38Cory Allen?

  Uh, I'm mainly just kind of like, you know, you could go read a bunch of reports. It's kind of, I think I feel like that was supplements too, where it's like, you can read all about them, where you could just take one and see how you feel.

• 1:11:51Chris Williamson?

  And that again, if you could bottle the placebo effect, you'd have the most powerful effect in all of pharmacology, right? So the the point is whatever works for you, works for you and the mode by that happening kind of is a little bit irrelevant. So if someone's thinking, that sounds good, Cory, you sold me on binaural beats, mate. What is your suggested dosing? Is it more effective with speakers if they've got good quality speakers or with headphones and how often and et cetera?

• 1:12:22Cory Allen?

  Yeah, definitely with headphones. Uh, the how often you can listen to them, that's up to you, you know, how often you want to try and induce the effect. Uh, I I listen to them during meditation. A lot of them are made for meditation, you know. Uh, and it's very viable and given that they're thirty minutes long, it's like you don't have to worry about a timer or anything. You just turn it on and you know, when the track's done, you're done. Um, and also, if you're, I think another viable time is that, uh, you know, I've had a lot of people reach out to me and say that whenever they're feeling kind of like in a crisis mode of just like really overwhelmed, really stressed with work or or a relationship or whatever.

• 1:13:00Cory Allen?

  And they're in that kind of like panicky, like, ah, that that state to drop one on, to remember to use them then and drop one on, just kind of lay down and and take a little ten minute chill, you know, very useful in times like that as well. Um, also apparently if you're writing a book or working on your PhD, then the camera is very valuable, but yeah.

• 1:13:22Chris Williamson?

  I was listening to Adam Gazali, who's a neuroscientist on Sam Harris's podcast the other day, and he has got stage three, he's going into stage three FDA approval for brain training games that are made to force single focus, specifically to be used to combat ADD. But these games would actually require a prescription for you to get them, which I thought, I don't understand, like, it's just a game. But as with many things, something that can cause a positive change can also cause adverse reactions if not used

• 1:14:04Chris Williamson?

  properly or supervised or blah, blah, blah. But I wonder if down the line, we'll see prescriptions written, or perhaps at least doctors recommending binaural beats as part of a recovery protocol for someone who's post-surgery or PTSD or anxiety, depression, any number of psychological issues.

• 1:14:24Cory Allen?

  Yeah, a lot of therapists recommend them already for, just for people that are kind of dealing with just mental health challenges, you know, depression, anxiety, as you said, PTSD, things like that. Yeah, they're just sort of, they're like, hey, take, listen to one of these and call them in the morning, you know?

• 1:14:42Chris Williamson?

  I love it, man. I absolutely love it. Look, Cory, it's been awesome to have you on. Two and a half years, dude, and it was very well worth the wait.

• 1:14:49Cory Allen?

  Yeah, it's crazy how time flies when you're in the present.

• 1:14:52Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely. People want to check out your stuff, where should they go?

• 1:14:55Cory Allen?

  cory-allen.com. That's just C O R Y-Allen.com. It's all there. The Binaural Beats, the releasing to now course, my podcast, of course.

• 1:15:06Chris Williamson?

  Astral, go and check it out.

• 1:15:08Cory Allen?

  Yep. Yep. It's all there.

• 1:15:09Chris Williamson?

  Peace, dude. Thank you so much for today.

• 1:15:11Cory Allen?

  Yeah, thank you, man. We should check it out.