Updated 1/6/05
Some of the links on this page have content that might not be suitable for young children. Sites that are particularly inappropriate for children are marked with stars, although I do not take any responsibility for the content of any of these links. So, enter at your own risk.
[P.S. Have a site similar to mine, and want to swap links? Email me.]
And if you want to give little ole me a link - here's a banner you can use. (Yeah, yeah - I know I really need to update it and come up with one that has the modern 'lunarsight' URL. I think that address still works, though - believe it or not.)
Table Of Contents
Brainwave Entrainment/Cymatics
(A quick definition of Brainwave Entrainment - this involves using stimuli such as strobe lights or pulsating sound to "tune" brainwaves to certain frequencies. Your brain mimics anything it sees and hears with its own brainwaves. So, if you know the brain produces X frequency when you're asleep, and you create soundwaves of this frequency, it will cause you to fall asleep if you listen to it. That's why ocean waves often make people sleepy. It's often used to achieve altered states of consciousness.)
(Cymatics, on the other hand, is the study of the effects of sound on matter. So, healing using sound tones would loosely fall under this category.)
A Visionary Sound Arts Interface - This is another site that deals with using various sound techniques to attain states of altered consciousness. (The three it deals with are brainwave entrainment, harmonic resonance of body parts, and using less common musical scales.) It also has a plethora of new age and electronic music links and some other neat stuff.
Brainwave Entrainment/Intelegen Inc - This site has information on achieving altered states of consciousness using binaural beats. (A binaural beat is when two different sounds are piped into the left and right ear respectively. The difference in frequency between these two sounds creates the illusion of a third noise, when your brain tries to put everything together. This brain will mimic the frequency noise with its own brainwaves, and go to the corresponding mental state associated with that frequency. For more, check out the Brainwave Research link below.)
Brainwave Generator - This is a shareware program that uses both binaural beats and pulsating lights for brainwave entrainment - if you really want to toy around with brainwave entrainment and altered states of consciousness, it's a very useful program to have. (The presets they include are great - one is very useful to help somebody fall asleep, for example.) Also, be sure to check out the BWGEN message board - it has a lot of useful information about brainwave entrainment, particularly this brainwave entrainment frequency list that was posted there by a Dennis Webber in July of 2001.
Buzzmachines.Com - "Buzz" is a MOD-style musical sequencer/digital composer which I find comes in handy for brainwave entrainment and creating all sorts of trancy and weird sound effects. It also happens to be freeware. But, but, but - if you're not familiar with MOD-style digital composers, don't even bother -- go down to the Syntrillium Software link, and download Cooledit - it's more user-friendly and easier to figure out.
Brainwave Research - This site has a great deal of information about using soundwaves and blinking lights to bring about altered states of consciousness and other changes in mental state. It also has a great chart, which lists all the different brainwave frequencies, and the mental states associated with them. Sadly enough, it looks like much of this site is gone - although these two listed webpages luckily still remain.
Computer Narcotics - Computer Narcotics uses sound [in the form of a series of pulsing beats or clicks] to create altered states of consciousness. The programmer seemed particularly interested in replicating the effects of recreational drugs legally and without long-term side effects. I think it pales in comparison to Brainwave Generator, but it's still an interesting curiosity. This is one of the only sites I could find that has a copy of it for download. It's midway down the page. I'd virus-check it to be safe, although I didn't detect any. (Addendum 3/7/04 - it doesn't seem to cooperate with Windows XP, which is what I'm running now, as luck would have it.)
The Cosmic Octave - Information on the research of a Swiss mathematician named Hans Cuosto. He believed each planet had a musical tone associated with it, and these tones could affect people in various ways. While it gets kind of drenched in new age terminology, there's some very useful information here, particularly the table converting the periods of orbit of the various planets into sound, color, and tempo.
Future Dynamic Advantage - This site has a series of devices for sale that expand the mind in some way. The most useful thing at this site is a table of frequencies, and the effects of these frequencies on the brain. Click here for that in particular : Neural Frequency Association Listings
Hypersonic Effect - An article about the effects of sound higher than humans can hear. Studies show we might be aware they are there on some level.
LucidQuest - The owner of this website is two parts mad scientist, and two parts musical composer. The electronic compositions he's authored mix fractal soundscapes and binaural beats together for some interesting effects. (Click on the Samples link on the main page.)
Monroe Institute - This organization has done quite a bitt of research involving using sound to achieve altered states of consciousness. It's one of those sites I feel obligated to include here.
Neil Slade's Amazing Brain Music Adventure - This site is a treasure trove of information on the brain and how music/sound can affect it. A lot of paranormal topics, like out of body experiences and aliens are also covered. In addition, it has a lot of ear candy to listen to - one of those sites you can kill hours searching through.
New Developments - This site's best feature is [yet] another frequency list that was compiled/researched by a lady named Barbara Hero. This list deals with parts of the body, and what frequency these parts resonate at. (Some of these frequencies do seem to have therapeutic potential. I was playing with them, plugging them into a sound generator program I have, and I found the frequency associated with blood circulation made short work of my headache.)
OneWithAll.Net - Another site that has some interesting information on brainwave frequencies, and the effects operating at these frequencies have on the brain. While the first table repeats a lot of the same information the other brainwave tables I have listed here do, there is a second table that gives all the MIDI notes, and their corresponding sound frequencies. This one comes in very handy -- by cross-referencing with the other table, you can know which notes will have what effect on the brain, and create MIDI mood music designed to have certain effects on the brain.
PHI - SOUND AND HEALING - This site has a lot of information on music and sound, particularly the history of music and how different cultures found religious significance in different notes. It also has info on how music and sound can create altered states of consciousness. It's kind of a mish-mosh to search through, but it's well worth the effort. (Tons of interesting links too.)
Radiation Health Foundation - The main page really doesn't have anything relevant to Brainwave Entrainment or Cymatics, but this bizarre frequency listing they have might be - I'm still trying to decipher it - it's such a mish-mosh of different things mixed together.
SBaGen - This is a freeware binaural beat generator that actually runs in DOS. It has some nice presets supposedly emulating the Monroe "Focus" series. (Brainwave Generator does as well, but it's debated all the time how accurate a representation the emulation is.) It helps to know how to type DOS line commands to use this, BUT you can get around it somewhat by associating the preset files with SBaGen, and then just clicking on the preset icons to run them.
Silent Sounds - This site has a few more charts of sound frequencies that supposedly have mind-effecting or therapeutic uses. Since they don't label them well on the page, here are the two tables with all the good stuff on it : Table 1 & Table 2. The first is more like the table at the Brainwave Research site listed above. The second deals with specific ills [headache, stomach ache, etc] and what sound frequencies supposedly can correct these ills.
Stichting Huygens-Fokker: List of intervals - This is a very useful resource for creating nice harmonic relations between tones. Basically, it gives you the names of all the harmonic relationships as well as the numerical ratio that the harmonic relationship is based on. Given two tones, the higher tone should be that ratio of the lower tone. For (3/2) for example, if the lower tone is 100 HZ, the higher tone will be 100 HZ X (3/2), or 150 HZ. This comes in handy in designing Brainwave Generator presets with multiple audible tones - since you can create combinations of tones that harmonically 'mesh' with each other.
Synchronicity - This site sells musical albums that create altered states of consciousness when listened to [They do this with embedded sounds that entrain the brain, most likely.] While this site is light on useful information, there are a few nice sound clips here and there that are enjoyable to listen to.
Syntrillium Software - They have a sound generator program called CoolEdit which is excellent for creating sounds specifically to alter one's mental state. The programmer includes a lot of good information on this topic in the documentation for the program. (Note: This company no longer exists - Adobe bought them out and changed the name of Cooledit to Adobe Audition. The link will redirect you to that site, most likely. If you want a free alternative, try Mindsync. It's a stripped-down forerunner to Cooledit that was made circa 1993.)
Transparent Corporation - They offer some interesting Brainwave Entrainment software that lets you to incorporate more unusual entrainment methods into the mix. (For instance, there's an interesting panning effect you can use. Another effect gradually increases and reduces the lower frequency ranges in the carrier soundscape.) Brain Sound Studio allows you to apply the entrainment effects over any WAV file. Neural Noise Synthesizer lets you apply the entrainment effects over background noise generated by the software itself.
Turf's Electroherbalism Webpage - This has some nice information on it about herbs and electrical frequencies used in healing/other things. Particularly useful is a compilation of frequency lists -- while these frequencies are intended to be used as EM fields, I've had some luck toying with them as auditory tones. (One helped my sinus headache and other circulation problems in my forehead.)
Vectormedia Software - The best thing on this site is a program called Atmosphere, which can produce nature soundscapes that don't get repetitive or monotonous. It's commercial software, but you can try it out at no cost. (There's also a "lite" version that's freeware, I think.) This program works very well with Brainwave Generator - the background soundscapes in Brainwave Generator presets often are very monotonous, since they are looped WAV files.
Virtual Hypnotist - This is a freeware, open-source program that pretty much describes itself. It's very neat, especially since you can create your own hypnosis scripts. (All it really is is a text file - use an already existing one as a reference.)
VoiceSync - This page has a great deal of sound applications available for download, covering a wide range of topics. One, for example, will take the position of all the planets in the sky for any given date, and convert it into an elaborate sound chord. Another will convert the composition of minerals into elaborate sounds. Most of these do seem to have to do with sound in one way or another. (Read : This site is a proverbial wet dream for an electronic musician or sound therapy hobbyist.)
About : Paranormal Phenomena - This is part of the About search engine, but it's such a good resource for paranormal phenomena, it stands on its own. You can use this to dig up information on just about any paranormal event imaginable.
American Association Electronic Voice Phenomena - This site gives information and sound examples of "spirit voices" captured using conventional audio and video technology. While I'm not sure these are really the voices of ghosts, some of the voices they've captured sound freaky as all hell, even if there's a more rational explanation for them.
Anne's Astral Webpage - This is a website with a lot of information about astral projection.
Atlantis Rising - Atlantis Rising is a magazine dealing in paranormal events, weird science, and ancient mysteries, among other things. They have a very nice website, with a lot of archive articles from their magazine, among other things.
CrystalLinks Metaphysical & Science Page - The name pretty much says it all -- it has an extensive amount of information on metaphysical and paranormal topics -- it kind of heads into the terrain of new agey stuff as well, but it's worth sifting through. Navigating it is very easy, since it's set up like an encyclopedia.
fUSION Anomaly - The way the individual pages connect aat this site is an art unto itself. They weave a wonderful web, and it's full of useful information about paranormal and metaphysical topics. I could have just as easily put this in Eye/Ear Candy, since it's a very visually interesting site.
The Skeptical Inquirer - With all the wacky pseudo-scientific stuff out there, I find this site/magazine is good at playing the role of a devil's advocate. While truth is sometimes stranger than fiction, the mere fact something is strange doesn't always mean it's true.
Sleep Paralysis - This an interesting document on sleep paralysis, that phenomenon where you are mentally conscious of your surroundings, but unable to move. It's thought that this may have been what spawned many tales of incubus visitation and alien abduction, since one of the things associated with this is the person often feels a "presence" nearby.
Viewzone Magazine - Another Paranormal Events Website/Magazine. It seems to be heavy on content.
Deviant Art -
Another site where you can peruse the work of various artists.
Compared to Renderosity, it's a little less 3D-crazy in scope.
The rendered, half-naked virtual babes don't seem to be as big a
percentage of the overall gallery.
Renderosity - A haven for digital artists online - the galleries here are huge, and exhibit work that make use of many different digital art applications (like Poser and Bryce, for instance).
The Scene - Site dedicated to displaying the work of digital artists.
Electronic Music Sites & Resources
Alternate Modes Of Underwater
Consciousness - This is the page on
Soundclick
with all my electronic music. Humor me and give my MP3s a spin -
they're all freely available for download. (I'm actually getting
better with the sound dynamics. No really - I am!)
Bomb Visual Music - Bomb is a screensaver/eye candy program that actually responds to music and sound that your computer makes, as well as keyboard input. The effects are sort of like Acidwarp, except the process by which the pattern changes isn't a loop of 'presets', nor is it completely random. It's very hypnotic. (Try using a microphone when running it. Brainwave Generator also seems to interact nicely with it.)
ChaosPro - Chaospro is a program that I use. It can generate fractal art, using many different fractal equations as the source for this art. It also can create some very neat animated fractals. Check it out.
Coagula - This site has on it a program that allloows you to draw images -- it kind of functions like a weird paintbrush program. Now, what's this doing in fractal music, do you ask? Once you've made a picture, this program can convert it into an interesting synth sound. (This isn't the main link to this page, but the rest of the page is in a foreign language.)
Crusher-X Live - This website has a fractal music generator which bases music on vapor and force feedback. It's not a typical MIDI sort of generator. It's more of a MOD sort of program.
Cynique's Corner - This site has a fractal music program called Oblivion which bases melodies on chaos and random number seeding.
FMusic Home - The home of one of the fractal music generators I use to create the strange sounds on my website. FMusic is a freeware program that creates music based on cellular reproduction models.
Fractal Music Lab - This website contains a great deal of information about fractal music, and a nice archive of fractal music generators to download. This is where I found Artsong, another fractal music generator I used to create the sound on this website. (Artsong takes bitmap pictures that you can provide, and translates them into MIDI music.)
The Music In Numbers- TMIN is a program that creates fractal music based on combinations of numbers that you supply. It's a lot of fun to play with. (For the real hardcore fractal enthusiasts, it's actually using a variation of a fractal called the Morse-Thue sequence to create the music.)
MuSoft Builders - MuSoft created a fractal music program called [for lack of a better name] A Musical Generator - which is extremely versatile. You can use many, many different kinds of fractal equations in creating music.
**The Door Into Summer - Okay, this fellow wins points for innovation - he uses a sound application called MIDImage to convert pictures into musical compositions - he tends to use very good synths, versus the typical glicks and gleeks and blips and bleeps that MIDIs are interpretted as on a computer. The pictures he uses for his compositions - er, he seems to use a lot of images of half-naked women garbed in lingerie. (See the star before the site name? Don't say I didn't warn you..)
The Sounds Of Pulsars - Pulsars are these strange heavenly bodies that "pulse" radiation at regular intervals. They make some interesting noises -- some sound like an old newspaper printing press, while some pulse so quickly they sound like one of those electric blenders.
Will's Natural Radio Page - This site lists all the different natural "noises" the atmosphere and heavenly bodies make, and how to listen to them using either an AM radio or very simple equipment you can pick up at a hobby shop. Some of these noises are very strange. (A couple almost sound "alive", in a way.)
ArjenLucassen.com - This Dutch musician is a genius. He does these elaborate rock operas fusing all sorts of different musical genres (everything from metal to electronic to Celtic to new age). Most (but not all) of his work is under the name Ayreon.
Downhill Battle - A very anti-music industry website. While I don't agree with everything they believe in, they are definitely on the right track - in it's current state, the music industry screws over musicians, more often than not, and tends to dilute both the quality and variety of music available. (It's all a big corporate machine these days, with the companies that own the record labels often owning the radio stations as well. It practically reeks of a vertical monopoly.)
Homestar Runner - One of the funniest sites on the web, hands down. Any crappy text I write here won't do this site justice.
A Deal With The Devil =)
Services that require you put their banner(s) on your page if you use them. They held up their end of the bargain, so here I am holding up mine.
Here's another site that requested a complimentary link:
