Resurrecting The Acoustic Phoenix

This is going to be an attempt to bring back the old Sonic Alchemy Logbook that I used to produce on the Papercut Suicide website about 15 years ago :

http://lunarsight.com


A little about the website :

That website evolved out of a Geocities site I created in 1996, and it certainly looks its age. I think any modern web developer would probably have an aneurysm reading the HTML code that went into that page. It's equal parts Netscape Navigator and Microsoft FrontPage, and it's a testament to the backwards compatibility of the internet that the page still works at all. (Not only does it still work, but it shockingly looks pretty good from mobile devices -- I'm not sure how the heck that happened.)

Now that I've given the back history of the main website, I'll go on the record and indicate probably nobody cares about most of the website. Like many websites from the early internet, it was primarily a place to post poetry, art, animated gifs, and random links to random things.

However, it seems that one subset of pages did and still do get a lot of attention. That being the Brainwave/Cymatic Frequency List :

http://lunarsight.com/freq.htm

Brainwave Entrainment :

In the late 90s / early 00's, I was heavily interested in computer-generated music and sounds. Early on, I used a sound editor called CoolEdit for much of my early experimentation. One feature of CoolEdit was a way to create sounds that entrained the brain to certain mental states.


I'll get more into this later, but to quickly summarize brainwave entrainment now, it's a method of using sound, light (and other stimuli) to coax the brain into various mental states (wide awake, asleep, etc).


Let me provide a simple visual example - A strobe light. 

If a strobe light is flickering 15 times a second, the brain is going to try and replicate this rate with its own brainwaves. (The brain plays monkey-see/monkey do with the stimuli.)

Now, different brainwave rates are associated with different mental states.

Basically, slower brainwaves (under 7 HZ) are associated with sleep. Higher brainwaves (8 HZ and above) are associated with being awake. Generally, the higher up you go, the more wide awake you are. So, 10 HZ would be awake but fairly relaxed. Whereas at 20 HZ and higher, you're playing some intense fighting video game, and are putting every ounce of concentration into not getting your butt kicked by the other guy. [Read : You're as wide awake as wide awake can possibly be.]

Back To The Frequency List :

As I got deeper into experimenting with sound, I began to play with other sound-based applications. I was big on fractal music generators for a while, and when I was doing more monotonous data entry work, I often would have the fractal music playing indefinitely, to keep my brain occupied.

I also began to use an application called Brainwave Generator, which like Cool Edit, had a method of creating sounds to entrain the brain. (I'll come back to all the brainwave entrainment methods in a later post. There are all manner of different ways to do it, and the individual methods don't exist in a vacuum either. You can mix and match them together.)

Anyway -- I began to find all manner of different websites online indicating different frequencies associated with different things. The nature of the frequencies weren't just limited to brainwave entrainment. They covered ground associated with other 'sound healing' methods [chakras, for instance]. Also, some of the frequencies weren't associated with sound at all. [Rife Frequencies were presumably used for healing, but the healing was doled out via machines that produced 'energy'.]

I began to compile a list of all the frequencies I came across.

The list was originally intended for my own personal experimentation. I was heavily dabbling in electronic music at the time, and the frequency list served as a 'sound dictionary' for me. For instance, if I wanted to represent the planet Mars in a track, what better way to do it than use a sound frequency that was calculated right from the revolution/rotation of the planet? (That really appealed to my inner geek.)

I ultimately decided to post the frequency list online, figuring there may be some other people out there who would find some use in it (or at least get a laugh out of it).

Again, this was when the internet was still young, and people were more interested in just sharing information rather than making a profit off everything.

The Sonic Alchemy Logbook

For a while, I was posting my sonic experimentation to a separate page on Papercut Suicide. It can be found here :

http://lunarsight.com/son-alc.htm

I also included samples of the sonic experimentation for other people to download. Brainwave Generator presets were my preferred method of posting the samples, since the preset files were usually pretty small. I sometimes would also post WAV files for limited periods of time (although file size was often a problem - there was limited storage back then).

Ultimately, I stopped updating the logbook, since I was going into the HTML each time I wanted to add an entry, and it was a pain in the neck.

Blog-GING? Can I HAS Blog-GING?

I had been considering bringing back the Sonic Alchemy Logbook for years.

I kept on hearing about this 'blog' thing, which supposedly made it super easy to post information without even having to code anything in HTML. (What manner of sorcery is this??)

I began searching for a blogging site to use, only to find out I already had one. (Apparently the multi-headed Hydra that is Google had Blogger as part of its lists of services.)

So, here I am -- hopefully I can maintain this blog over time (provided there are no lapses in my attention span, which is typically pretty good as long as I steer clear of butterflies and other small distracting mammals -- like squirrels, who I think were put on this earth simply to distract humans with their silly antics.)

Mike / Papercut Suicide