The 1839 Discovery Behind Our Free Relaxation MP3

We put together a meditation track called RELAX, and you can download it at no cost. No catch. The recording is built to gently coax your brainwaves toward a calmer, more settled state, the kind of quiet you might reach for after a long day.

The idea at the heart of it goes back much further than you'd guess. In 1839, a German physicist named Heinrich Wilhelm Dove noticed something odd about how the ear and brain respond to a particular kind of sound. Dove was no fringe figure: he held a fellowship in the Royal Society, worked as a physicist, and ran the Prussian Meteorological Institute. He was the first to document the effect that a specific auditory stimulus creates inside human perception.

His observation sat quietly for over a century. Only during the 1950s through the 1970s did researchers turn it into a usable audio technique. Several people have since claimed credit for the technology that grew out of it, but the original discovery belongs to Dove.

What we've done is take that same principle and shape it around mindfulness and relaxation. The free MP3 is our version of that application. Think of it as a small gift, something to put on when you want to unwind.

If you're curious about the research, try searching for mindfulness and the psychological effects of brainwave entrainment. A fair amount of published work on the subject lives in the PubMed database.

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