Honest feedback — I tried the service for 20 minutes (that's the amount of time that life allowed) and it felt promising. But you are fighting a hard battle here:
* "6 free sessions left" might not be enough for me to make sure that the music doesn't engage my creative hemisphere too much (I see this problem with most musical content),
* the pricing is fairly high. I'm in Poland and I pay $5 a month for Spotify, this is what you are compared to. I'm not saying it's impossible, but I need a fairly good justification to pay you $7/month just for ambient work music.
* I could not find out if there is an iPhone app. There seems to be, but I can't find it in the app store, and can't find mention of it on the web. This is important, I often work out of cafes, and I need a phone app with offline capability.
Just for the reference, on my phone you'd be competing with Naturespace, where I bought lots of tracks and which serves my needs for muting out the world around me.
There is discussion about extending the trial, and I agree completely.
And we're almost done with both the iPhone app and the Android app! Stay tuned :)
Good point about Spotify. I could have sworn I pay $10 for it. Around $8 for Netflix, unless I'm mistaken. At any rate, I try to stay out of the business processes that go into making those decisions, for my own sanity, with the exception of occasionally giving discounts to my 10 twitter followers ;) haha. I've relayed your feedback to Junaid my co-founder though. Thanks again.
I also want to discourage the use of "sessions." Lost one because I didn't change the time limit. Lost one because my computer/browser restarted. I'm wary of clicking things like 'skip' now, despite knowing that I could just incognito it. A thirty or even seven day trial would be much better!
Definitely don't want you to be wary of the skip button. That's an important feature. You should love the music you're playing.
So here's a pro-tip: as an anonymous user, play the session for just a little bit without moving the slider more than a minute or two. Click skip within that time period and you're golden.
The skip does have more leeway if you just register. It's free! Plus, as an anonymous user you're not going to get near as much variety. Every time you come back in incognito you'll get the same stuff. We have so many people doing this, but I don't know how they stand it! Truly though, I do not care if people go incognito.
But we just kinda need to know a bit about you to make sure you get the right sessions, instead of generic one-size-fits-all sessions. Yeah, I know how that sounds, as if I'm just dying to get your email or something, right? Use a fake one, who cares. I only need the survey information for one reason: Everyone's truly is - to quote Tyler Durden - a beautiful and unique snowflake ;)
It gets better and better afterwards and the more you use it.
For me it's just not worth it to create an account for 7 sessions. And paying is not an option either, after using it quite successfully for 1-2 weeks I am still not convinced to drop 7$ a month on it. As a college student that is a lot of money. With those 7 sessions it is not possible to estimate whether the app can actually create a lot of different sounds or not. With intense focus I have been through all of them I think and it was like 10-15 30 minute sessions. Nothing to spend money on.
Spotify and Netflix pricing varies by region. If you're in the US, you likely to pay $10 for it but the person you're responding to is in Poland and pays 19,99 PLN which is $5 USD.
I'm sorry if I sound lay here, but I have probably the most basic question of all:
how do I know if it is actually working? How should I feel while (or after), say, I listen to the Intense Focus loop?
I actually tried a both Quick Relax and Intense Focus (both with earphones). For the latter I even did the registration and survey. I put the Quick Relax 15 minutes track, on first, closed my eyes and laid my head on my arm. Ten minutes in I wasn't feeling more relaxed either physically or mentally. So I tried again, but the track that came out this time felt a little unpleasant so I gave up.
So I went to try the Intense Focus thing, and I have been listening to it while reading all the comments to this reply and some others below this one. Once again I don't really feel more focused or anything. I'm sorry to say this but I even find some tracks unpleasant to listen to.
Am I doing something wrong? Are there optimal conditions I should put myself in for this to work? Does the fact that there was low noise (TV in the other room) around me might have prevented the Quick Relax from working?
I don't mean to sound to negative here, mine are just genuine questions from someone who would really like something like this to work.
I have tried a both a 15-minute "quick relax" session and a full 8-hour sleep session. Based on the "quick relax" session, I assumed this music was based primarily on binaural beats (hence the need for headphones), but the sleep session didn't seem to use the beats as strongly (if at all). I have trouble sleeping at night due to both stress and restless leg syndrome, and while this music didn't put me to sleep right away (and the headphones definitely didn't help), I do think I was better off last night with the music than without.
I would be willing to pay for this, but the current price is too high. I think about $24/year would be something I could justify (but still not an impulse buy). I listen to a lot of DJ mixes for free on Youtube/Mixcloud and buy a few tracks a month to support the producers I like. If I were to add your service as well, that would more than double my cost of music.
Not to add to your expenses, but definitely invest in some "sleep phones." I like the Took's brand, and it's the cheapest. You can lay completely on your side and the wafer-thin speakers don't bother you at all. Pretty decent sound quality too.
Sleep-phones are unfortunately essential to get the most out of the session, especially as an insomniac. (to be clear, I have no affiliation with any headphone brand)
I'm a lifelong, severe insomniac. Have restless leg too, though minor in my case. It was a major frustration for 11 years that I couldn't truly help my own insomnia with the audio stuff I was doing. There were protocols others had used/recommended, but they were pretty limited in their effectiveness. I kept experimenting with things, testing mostly on myself. The real breakthrough came when we perfected our use of HRTF ("3D" audio).
My problem was mostly sleep-onset insomnia, and this enabled me to create an interesting, constantly-moving 3D scene that was able to dissociate me from my daily worries and chattery mind. If you notice, the sounds rotate around your head. Our neuroscientist Giovanni Santostasi hypothesizes that one of the reasons the thing works so well is because it mimics the effect of rocking in a cradle or a hammock, since the ears do somewhat have to do with balance (he mentioned a study in which they analyzed the effects of rocking and it enhanced the quality of sleep from an EEG perspective - can ask him for it if you want).
After that it was a matter of finding relaxing ways to implement the stimulation. Giovanni is an expert on what's called slow-wave sleep. It's the deepest stage of sleep, and is where memory is largely consolidated. His work at Northwestern is almost exclusively developing audio stimulation to enhance slow-wave sleep. They recently got a ridiculous large grant from DARPA for it. Look him up if you're interested.
So, after some talk, I created a protocol to stimulate slow waves that also ended up involving the 3D audio.
It took some tweaking, lots and lots of testing, but the end results were... staggering. Frankly unbelievable.
The first time Giovanni did a sleep study on me with this new protocol, he thought I had faked the EEG data somehow, and I don't blame him. It was frankly more likely that I had somehow generated fake EEG-like microvolts for 8 hours than get the result that we did. Then he tried it on himself and got nearly the same result, which was a surprise because he can sleep standing up if he's tired enough.
What he saw on the EEG was that the sleep protocol enhances slow-wave oscillations by 20-30%. To put this in perspective, if you decide to pull and all-nighter tonight, tomorrow when you sleep, you'll see a slow-wave gain of only about 10% to compensate.
It's an insane result. Absolutely ridiculous.
But the thing is, the result is clear as day if you do a sleep study. We confirmed and confirmed and confirmed it. Take a look at the sleep study analysis on the website. I know it's hard to parse - we need to convert it into non-giovanni-speak. But look at those correlations, and how consistent the result of the stimulation is between subjects...
Not only this, but we're showing an increase in what are called Spindles, which are highly associated with memory consolidation. It's very likely that we are also increasing memory consolidation with this, in the same way that his department at NW is showing that using a phase-lock-loop auditory stimulus enhances memory consolidation.
I know you didn't ask any of this, it's probably boring. I'm just very passionate about sleep. Have a lot more to say about it in general but will stop here :)
To sum it up: What I'm getting at is that even if you weren't an insomniac, you can still very much benefit from using the sleep sessions!
AND I will bet you that if you get some special headphones that allow more freedom, it will help you get to sleep as well.
Please keep me updated. Message me or find me on brain.fm. Would love to be updated on your progress. Tell you what, if you commit to getting some sleep-phones, I'll give you the price of the headphone's worth of free Brain.fm time to test this out. I'm just curious now, and love helping a fellow insomniac. :)
As I'm sure you're aware, restless leg is an odd "itch" that can only be "scratched" by movement (for lack of any good words to describe it). The movement isn't compulsory, but the discomfort becomes overwhelming without it. I suspect the sensation is there all the time and not just at night, but there are enough other stimuli during the day to drown it out. The brain.fm music seems to have been effective for the same reason, providing a welcome distraction from the sensation.
Restless leg is supposedly a mineral deficiency, but my blood work comes out normal, and supplements haven't been helpful. Up until now, the only remedy I've found is working out in the middle of the night, which replaces the restless sensation with a tired-from-exercise sensation. This only works if I can fall asleep before the exercise wears off. The brain.fm effect is less powerful than exercise, but doesn't have a time limit for falling asleep. I wonder if this is unique to brain.fm, or if it would work with any other type of music.
Besides distracting from restless leg syndrome, the brain.fm music was quite relaxing (more so than ambient or nature music normally would be). I did notice the 3D effect, and wondered what that was about. There is clearly something going on here, but I don't have the knowledge or tools to say what. It sounds like your EEG sleep studies have done just that, so thanks for mentioning those. I had no idea it was so measurable.
This would be worthwhile it if the results are as good as you say they are. I've gone ahead and purchased the headphones - for science! Thanks for the offer, and for your epically-long reply. This type of thing is fascinating to me.
Great, so glad it's helping! Wait till you get the headphones... a whole new level. Keep me updated. I had Aaron get in touch with you but please feel free to send me any updates directly. Just my first name and brain.fm
I think the AI aspect could provide some interesting additional business ideas. I guess it's just AI for the uninformed, for you it's an algorithm that follows certain principles (no abrupt breaks, constant level...).
Creating playlists of songs that (when mixed together) adhere to those principles would be interesting in my opinion.
Thanks, yeah I had thought of that. I think it could potentially be useful in lots of different ways. Right now though it's very much geared toward this specific purpose. Much of its initial purpose was to align everything with the modulations/filters we're using, because doing it manually in a DAW is hell.
It's definitely not meant to replace musicians/composers. Actually I still work with musicians/composers to create tiny bits of sound (individual notes, etc) and stems for the AI to work with. More importantly, I'll work them to help me figure out how I can improve the AI for certain genres. Indie music / folk, for example, are particularly difficult. Rock, near impossible, so far. Could be the limitation of the stereotypical 3:05 long song, but then I think, Mike Oldfield.. haha. Fun challenges!
I would LOVE to make a tool for musicians though. The 3D-audio stuff alone could be pretty useful I think. If I can do some cool stuff with it, I'd love to see what other, more creative people can do. I've never seen it done this way. There's some VST plugins, but they're not that great. Of course there's a ton of binaural microphone recordings, like the barbershop. But it's a whole different level to be able to move thousands of generated sounds around in 3D space.
Maybe sometime in the future when things calm down :)
Hey, happy to answer that. Do a page find for the word "emergent" here and you should find it. I've explained it a few times, though briefly. I did a write-up of it a while back that I need to find and post somewhere. But anyway, feel free to reply here if you have any questions at all.
heh, "emergent." Sounds like I'm asking you look up the latest Hunger Games knockoff.
Hey, great question, though I'm not sure if you want the audio or neurological explanation, or both :)
I'm also not sure how technical you want or how much you know already, so apologies if I'm too technical, and apologies if I'm not technical enough. I'll just try to start from the beginning and lay everything out from there, as briefly as I can. Tragically, however, I was born without brevity.
1) Brain.fm: The Brain's Perspective
When a sound enters your ear, it's converted from a pressure wave to an electrical impulse, which you can measure in the brain as a kind of spike on an EEG, or a cortical response. If the sound plays again, another spike occurs (although typically smaller). If a sound keeps being repeated in a fast and precise enough way, the cortical responses start to resemble rhythms already in the brain.
For example, if you tap your finger rapidly on the table, you might be tapping at 10hz (10 taps a second). 10hz is also a very dominant in the brain. If you could tap your finger precisely enough, and for a long enough time, what you would see in the brain (if you know what you're doing) is new activity at 10hz. This is called the Frequency Following Response, and it's well established. Check it out on pubmed, etc, if you're interested.
Now if you keep tapping for even longer - and again, if you're super precise about it - your existing brainwave patterns near that same frequency will start to align themselves towards the phase and frequency of your tapping.
BTW sorry about the delay in responding to you. Believe it or not, in between some meetings I was searching for a good article this whole time to show you. Here it is: http://www.pnas.org/content/111/41/14935.full
This effect is called lots of things, including, confusingly, the frequency-following response by some in the private sector. It's most often known by the public as brainwave entrainment, but that's rarely in the literature. In the literature you see all kinds of words for it: neural entrainment, auditory driving, auditory entrainment, steady state responses of various types... The level of confusion over what to call this thing is only eclipsed by the number of names made up for methods to induce it - all referring to the same thing: rhythmic auditory stimuli. No, better not call it that, in this paper its gonna be sinusoidal amplitude modulation, click trains, acoustic iterance, isochronous auditory stimuli, temporal sound... So, it gets a bit crazy when you try to search for this stuff (so we'll be adding even more to our bibliography/research library soon. Let me know if you haven't seen that yet).
For the sake of this post let's just call it Entrainment.
Something that's also being figured out is how to define when exactly Frequency Following ends and Entrainment begins. Some say it doesn't matter, others say it's when the phase lines up, or if the new rhythm persists even when the external stimuli is removed, as in the article I linked you to. There's also ways to approximate the root source of a neural rhythm (external or internal), if you also feed the stimuli into the analysis at the same exact time.
Anyway, to sum it up, what we're doing is creating a rhythmic stimuli that resembles frequencies already in your brain. We play that stimuli long and consistently enough to actually register a pretty solid response on an EEG.
Of course, it gets more complicated than that. This is the brain we're talking about. The waveform of the audio modulations matters (brainwaves aren't perfect sine waves, after all), the way the frequency is changed over time matters. When do you take a break from the stimulation? When do you tone it down, or turn it up? And how do you adapt to people on an individual level? How do you measure it? Audio processing can change dramatically in the brain depending on the content of the audio!
But at any rate, changing the brainwaves of a person like this can also change their mental state. I'm not saying it takes over the brain. It just.. nudges it a bit in the right direction.
So that's the basic outline from that perspective. Hope it makes sense, of course if you have any questions don't hesitate.
2) Brain.fm: The Music Perspective
From an audio's point of view, we're doing a number of things to subtly create that necessary rhythmic stimulus.
a) We're modulating every piece of audio. It's these modulations that create a rapid rhythmic stimulus. If you listen carefully to Brain.fm, you may hear a fluttering sound. It's more obvious in some parts over others. We're using filtering techniques to target some frequency bands over others (and by frequency here, I'm now talking about the frequencies of pitch, not brainwaves, where a cello would be low and a violin would be high in frequency). Doing this, we can single out instruments, modulate parts of a nature soundscape but not others, or disguise the modulations as vibrator, tremolo, or the natural vibrations of instruments, strings or the LFOs of electronic music..
b) We align everything else in the session to the brain-frequency we're trying to hit, so there is no interference from a stray drum beat or a snapping twig. Not only is there no interference, but the entire audio "scene" is being actively used to guide your brain toward the goal state.
The 3D audio also factors into this a lot, because the mind pays attention to motion, and that helps elliminate habituation. But that's another story.
Hope this helped explain it. Completely understand if you need clarification, or an entirely new answer hah!
I know it was a vague question of mine, but I didn't realise the detail you were prepared to give it. So thanks, again. I'm no expert (my background is more musical), but I do understand most these concepts and perspectives involved. To articulate better my question: Technically how are you manipulating audio and what effect does that have on brainwaves. Your answer, understandably, was more contextual than specific. so let me specify the parts I am hoping to understand.
How do you manipulate audio?
I am in right in understanding your disguising a basic and specific pulse throughout the music. or... are you modulating it rhythmically (very slightly) out of phase with the rest of the music. If you are only applying it to certain frequencies then it seems you may be creating binaural beat like tendencies in the ears abillity to create implicit tones (Hidden frequencies, not physically present).
What effect does this have on brainwaves?
You stated in general you are matching rhythms to that of the brain. Can you expound this?
What theory of Rhythmic psychological organissation are you purporting/ascribing to? how is your audio intereacting with this model? What is the effect of your audio on the model?
I understand you may have a whole toolbox of tricks going on here and that you don't want to give away your product entirely. Feel free to gloss over introducing technical terms, though its helpful for all reading, I think most people here can quickly come upto speed on stuff. I'm not asking you for the secrets of your product - just more specifics on how it relates to the research you are citing.
Thanks for the article link, it looks very interesting reading.
A couple of reflections on your product: I personally don't like the music and therefore can't listen to it. It doesn't sound human to me and therefore my brain rejects it. Have you heard of the theory of "participatory discrepancy" (Keil C. and Feld, S. (1994). It highlights the value of discrepencies (randomness) rhythm for creating groove. I think cognitivly there is a similar principle at play (perhaps you know it, I can't find reference to it right now - will dig it out if this area interests you). I also feel, on the website, that the lack of actual specifics twinned with a large scholary general body of work, is ultimately devaluing your product. Though that may, quite rightly, be your choice in promotion, to engage me a couple of pages about whats actually going, twinned with a couple of very specifc to your model studies, would make me give this product real integrity and longterm value. For example Stober's powerpoint on the MIIR EEG dataset here (http://bib.sebastianstober.de/2015-01-31_NEMISIG.pdf - illustrates complex concepts that your describing, very simply. Incidentally I think lifetime subcriptions after a long trial period would probably have the most chance of getting my support.
We're planning on following that one up with a more robust study, because our users do get great results with HRV and it's an interesting topic.
One of our former neuroscientists published a meta-analysis, but it's a bit outdated now re: what we're doing. Still, it's on our site or in the journal if you're interested. :)
On the brain.fm they list results, but they are super flimsy. For focus, for example, n=17, and the difference between music vs non-music is much smaller than the standard deviation of either group.
So it's possible this stuff helps you focus, but it doesn't appear to be showing up on these studies.
It's actually a really good result, for a number of reasons. But I'll let Giovanni respond to this later and clarify (he's the neuroscientist that wrote the paper).
I apologize for the delay, he's dealing with some family and health problems right now. But I promise we'll clear this up.
I've been doing this stuff for a while and I love talking about it.
I've contacted Giovanni, our lead neuroscientist, so hopefully he'll be able to get on soon as well.
I'm a regular of HN and it's wild to see something of mine up here.