A Free Relaxation MP3 Built on an 1839 Discovery

We put together a meditation MP3 called RELAX, and yes, it really is free. The audio is made to nudge your brainwaves toward a calmer, more settled state, the kind of quiet you might reach for after a long day.

The idea behind it goes back further than you might guess. In 1839 a physicist named Heinrich Wilhelm Dove noticed something unusual about how the ear and the brain respond to a particular kind of sound. Dove was no fringe figure. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society and ran the Prussian Meteorological Institute. He was simply the first to describe what happens when the perceptual system meets this specific auditory signal.

His observation sat as a curiosity for more than a century. It wasn't until roughly the 1950s through the 1970s that people turned the effect into a usable audio technology. Several groups have claimed credit for that later development, and the history gets tangled, but the original discovery traces back to Dove.

What we've done is take that same principle and shape it toward mindfulness and relaxation rather than anything clinical. Consider the MP3 a small gift. If you want to read the research for yourself, search for 'Mindfulness' along with 'Psychological Effects of Brainwave Entrainment' and look at the published studies indexed on PubMed.gov.

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