RutSum

Survival Without Stereo Headphones

I was talking to The Uncool Shitty yesterday, when he told me about a really cool phenomenon related to wave mechanics. He told me that if you put two different sound waves with similar frequencies (with a difference less than 30 hertz) into each of your ears, your brain interprets them as beats, instead of two plain sounds. These beats are supposedly called Binaural Beats, and a bit of digging around on the web told me that just about everybody on this planet knows about binaural beats, except of course, ignorant little me.

Wikipedia had a sample music file (ogg), but the prerequisite was a stereo headphone set, so that the audio channels were split, and different frequencies could be directed to each of my ears.

Unluckily, my pair of Intex Stereo Headphones, the super cheap ones, for a 120 bucks (Indian Rupees), had broken down recently. Not completely, just one of the speakers seems to have gone mute. This happened when it accidentally fell down during a fight. Even though the headphones were cheap, I quite surprisingly got a 6 month warranty on it, which had convieniently expired just 2 weeks before ‘the accident’.

Now I flunked open my old drawer, dug in my hands and pulled out an old pair of earphones, which had clearly been smuggled from a Kingfisher airplane. The cord was so small that I couldn’t even sit upright while wearing them, so I got a crank in my neck from bending over. I finally got to experience binaural beats, and I tell you, this clip is 30 minutes of pure bliss. You can get high by just listening to it.

The main point which I wanted to stress here was the sad departure of my headphones, which are a real big friend if you have your board exams going on and you get tired of your books. You just plug ‘em in, put on your favorite playlist on Amarok, and fall asleep. The best way to relax.

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