You don't need a subscription or a noisy app to try binaural beats. This whole site has a Sound Studio built in, and it can generate binaural beats live in your browser — free, offline, and with nothing tracked. Here's how to use it, and what to realistically expect.
How to generate binaural beats here
- Put on headphones — binaural beats only work with a separate tone in each ear.
- Open "Customize" in the top navigation to reveal the Sound Studio.
- Under Soundscape, choose Binaural beats.
- Use the Carrier and Beat sliders to set the base pitch and the beat frequency (the difference between your ears).
- Start gentle — a few minutes, low volume — and see how it feels.
Which beat frequency to pick
The "beat" is the difference in Hz between the two tones, and it's usually matched to a brainwave band. A common starting map:
| Band | Beat (Hz) | Commonly used for |
|---|---|---|
| Delta | ~1–4 Hz | Deep sleep, rest |
| Theta | ~4–8 Hz | Meditation, deep relaxation |
| Alpha | ~8–13 Hz | Calm, relaxed alertness |
| Beta | ~14–30 Hz | Active focus, alertness |
| Gamma | ~40 Hz | Peak focus (see our 40 Hz guide) |
A gentle place to begin is 10 Hz (alpha) for relaxation — the most-studied starting point — with a carrier somewhere comfortable around 150–200 Hz.
The honest part
Binaural beats are pleasant and popular, but the science is genuinely mixed. A meta-analysis found real but modest effects across cognition, anxiety and pain, and other reviews call the clinical evidence inconclusive.1 The brain does seem to partly "follow" the beat, but the link from that to big changes in focus or mood isn't nailed down. So: a reasonable thing to try, a nice ritual, occasionally helpful — not a guaranteed brain hack.
The best binaural beats generator is the one you already have open — this one. Free, private, and honest about what it is.
Evidence tier: Promising, mixed. Real but modest effects in research; not a proven treatment. Lovely to experiment with. How we rate evidence →
References
- Garcia-Argibay M, Santed MA, Reales JM. Efficacy of binaural auditory beats in cognition, anxiety, and pain: a meta-analysis. Psychol Res. 2019;83(2):357-372.