Planetary Beats

Binaural beats: Some believe that you can modify your mental state by introducing perceptual-audio "beats" into your ears with headphones. I want to test this, so I built a synthesizer using MobMuPlat. This is a utility that enables you to run PureData patches on mobile devices.

Whether it's pseudoscience or not, it's my first time working with MobMuPlat, and I had a lot of fun building this!

My goal is to create a number of different "moods", associated with the various planets, based on their attributes: density, composition, temperature, orbital period, and more. To that end, I've recorded a bunch of spatial audio tracks and will be mixing them with environmental soundtracks generated via myNoise.net .

The basic "BinOsc" patch/GUI includes a frequency selector slider, plus a slider for the frequency of the "beat". The beat is produced by playing a slightly different frequency into each of your ears; if the two frequencies are 2Hz apart, you'll hear a pulse that cycles 2 times per second. Some people believe that if you do this, your brain will naturally begin producing more electric cycles at the 2 Hz frequency. I'm skeptical, but it will be fun to play with, and it's a good way to learn PureData. :)

There's also a button to toggle the oscillators on or off.

The planetary data

For the data, I mostly referred to NASA's guide here. I created a spreadsheet relating the characteristics of each planet to a mood: Mercury would be a bouncy, summery rock song for hot weather and low gravity, while Uranus has a colder mood with piano music that suggests "water" to me, also incorporating some reversed notes for an ethereal quality (as it's a gas giant).

Next steps

• Iris notation for each planet's song; create visual icons (not just text buttons)

• Figure out how to trigger 2 audio files + predefined binaural beat (pitch & pulse), with a single button, for each planet