Get Much Needed Sleep, Relax, Lucid Dream, Induce Creativity and Awareness with a Brainwave Generator
I have been using brainwave generators for years and was disappointed for quite some time that one was not available for OS X. Brainwave generators make binaural beats that through headphones can create specific brainwaves associated with calming, awake, deep sleep, intuition, focus, etc. Instead of taking uppers to get through studying in college like most undergraduate students, I used binaural beats to stay focused and get the creative juices flowing.
The theory behind binaural beats is that if you apply slightly different frequency sine waves to each ear, a beating affect is created in the brain itself, due to the brain’s internal wiring. If, in the presence of these tones, you relax and let your mind go, your mind will naturally synchronize with the beat frequency. In this way it is possible to tune the frequency of your brain waves to particular frequencies that you have selected, using of the four bands: Delta: deep sleep, Theta: dreaming and intuitive stuff, Alpha: awake, focussed inside, and Beta: awake, focussed outside (SBaGen Website: http://uazu.net/sbagen/#dl_mac).
SBaGen is a Unix-based Brainwave Generator. Download the .dmg file and Drag The Sbagen folder to your Applications folder to install it.
Sbagen is an UNIX Application, so we will need to use the Terminal to open Sbagen and play binaural beats.
Follow these instructions to start listening to binaural beats:
Navigate to the Sbagen Folder inside the Applications Folder. Double Click the file called START.command.
This will open the Sbagen Application inside Terminal. Instructions for using Sbagen are listed here. To view a listing of all the sequences (sound files), type “ls *.sbg”.
what are all these sequences? They are basically sound files that produce certain tones that get translated into brainwaves for various levels of activity. See the list below for some examples:
- ts-Brain-Alpha - awake, focused inside
- ts-Brain-Beta - awake, focused outside
- ts-Brain-Delta - deep sleep
- ts-Brain-Theta - dreaming and intuitive stuff
- Focus 10 - brain awake, body asleep
- Focus 12 - expanded awareness, in the mood to head out and explore
- Focus 15 - no time, 3 hours seems like 2 minutes
- Focus 21 - alternate energy systems, bridge into worlds with non-human entities
- Focus 22 - place where people with ‘loose, chaotic thoughts’ go after death
- Focus 24 - belief system territories, place where dogmatically inclined people go when dead
- Focus 27 - the park, a way-station, a place of high creativity, a stepping stone to areas beyond.
To play a sequence, type “Sbagen nameofthesequence.sbg”.
To play another sequence, quit Terminal and start over again. The documentation reveals how to link sequences together. For instance, I can induce an entire night of lucid dreaming by scheduling different sequences to play after one another. Read the documentation and the Sbagen website for more information.
Full documentation for Sbagen can be found here.
What did you learn in this post?
Or did it leave you with further questions?
Comment here to Ask Steve Blue!
Written by Steve Blue
steveblue@iuseapple.com
Roni
Couldn’t someone make one that’s more straight forward and easy to use. I guess I’m just too dumb to get this one up and running
Oct 12th, 2007 6:39 pm
steveblue
Roni,
At what point are you having an issue? I can help…
Oct 13th, 2007 10:15 am
Roni
I’ve got it running now, thanks though
Maybe I’m not sooo stupid :p
Oct 13th, 2007 12:52 pm
dusk
Don’t understand this at all, clicked on SBaGen and followed the download but ended up with a list that when I double click, just comes up with more lists. No idea how to actually listen to the binaurals.
Nov 2nd, 2007 9:27 am
steveblue
after you get the list by using the command ls, find the filename you wish to open.
type the command Sbagen followed by the name of the file you want to play.
i.e.
Sbagen nameofthesequence.sbg
Nov 2nd, 2007 10:21 am
Jona
I’ve used sbagen on my older computers and I love it so much! I have a MacBook running Leopard and I get this error whenever I try to load a .sbg or run the DEMO.command:
“Set audio output buffer size failed, status = 1852797029″
Any ideas? It should be fine with Leopard and Intel Macs, right? UNIX is UNIX, right?
Jan 13th, 2008 4:50 pm
steveblue
Jona,
Honestly, this would be a better question for the Sbagen mailing list.
Sorry,
Steve
Jan 13th, 2008 9:18 pm
BrainWaver
…came across this post while searching for a decent brainwave solution for the Mac… I think it is somewhat frustrating having to use a command line tool on OS X for this… currently I am running NeuroProgrammer in a virtual Windoze machine and hope the guys over there did not lie when they promised they were working on a native Mac version of NP2…
Cheers
Martin
Feb 16th, 2008 7:02 am
lucy
dragged it to my applications and nothing… i am a new imac user so that might be it.. i am so confused..
Mar 6th, 2008 5:48 pm
steveblue
lucy, you must follow the instructions in the post highlighted in blue. when you double click start.command, does a window appear with a command line interface?
Mar 12th, 2008 7:41 pm
Angela
What is the audio output for this?
cuz when i type in for example “sbagen focus-10-a.sbg ” this came out:
Set audio output buffer size failed, status = 1852797029
Mar 28th, 2008 12:46 am
beeblebroxx
to solve the problem of “Set audio output buffer size failed, status = 1852797029″ open up “Audio MIDI setup” in your /Applications/Utilities folder, and change the audio output from 2ch-24bit to 2ch-16bit. Also, make sure the format is 44100Hz.
easy as pie. I think you’ll have to re-do this after every reboot, unfortunately.
Apr 5th, 2008 10:22 pm
Nedlow
This is great info…many thanks!
Nedlow
May 29th, 2008 11:47 am