About five years ago, whilst carrying out research into how I could create the most relaxing music or audio products for people who are in rehab or suffering stress, I stumbled across the science of psychoacoustics. I researched the area thoroughly, and discovered that I could scientifically induce the brainwave rate to lower to a given frequency. This means that the heartbeat and relaxation response would follow, and respond as if the relaxation was completely natural. Brainwaves effectively are the electrical activity of the brain, and generally speaking the higher the frequency the higher the activity of the brain, and hence, the more alert or possibly agitated we are. Meditation is known to lower brainwave rates, as is sleep, or hypnotherapy.

The technique for doing this is called Binaural Beat Frequencies, and it manipulates the way in which the brain localizes sound. Each ear picks up a slightly different sound when one hears a noise, and to make various intrpretations of this difference the brain produces a wave which is the difference between the frequency heard in each ear. So for example, the right ear hears 440hz, and the left 447hz, and the superior olive in the back of the brain produces a wave of 7hz. If a sound is engineered to contain a certain frequency difference, the brain is made to produce a wave of 7hz (for example) again and again, and research shows that if this happens, the dominant brainwave responds to this repeated wave and is entrained by it.

Entrainment is a natural process, which is what happens when something falls into sync with another. If you were to leave twenty clocks in a room, all ticking at different times, it is said that after a given time they would all fall into sync!

I then went and learned to use a programme called Max MSP, which is a software programme that enables one to build musical or sonic devices for use in music software. It is a bit of a torturous programme but with a little help I was able to design a module which allowed me to control the frequencies of right and left outputs, and hence produce binaural beat frequencies. I then began to play with them and add music, and realised once, siting in my studio, that they really worked as I was listening to them with headphones and began to feel very euphoric and relaxed!

I decided on my frequency differences and layerings, added music, and then had the bright idea of adding them to some guided hypnotherapy recordings I was working on with Jill.  I hoped that the result would be a kind of "double whammy" of hypnotherapy and psychoaoustics. Obviously the hypnotherapy is very relaxing and leads to trance-like states, but when adding binaural beat frequencies, I realized that the effect was very powerful.

So the Psychoactive Hypnosis Series came about, and I honestly believe that these products are extremely effective, and I hope that in a clinical setting these may lower stress enough to remove the necessity of using habitual processes to relieve tension. What this would mean is that people would not need to go out and use alcohol or drugs to relax a bit, and therefore I hope might help to save lives.