"Automating" the "ganzfeld" example

[Chris Gagné]

Hello all,

I have been playing with Fadecandys for about six years, with the most recent implementation being a 2,048-LED, 2.65m diameter chandelier placed in the center of an 8m dome at the Ignition Festival in New Zealand last week. It was wired to run at full power or about 600W (~4kW incandescent equivalent). It did not disappoint.

I am also interested in sober music-driven shamanic practices. I am interested in offering a space for people to shake, dance, meditate, and rest using something like Osho's Kundalini Meditation practice plus a facilitated group container. I thought it would be interesting to augment the experience with LEDs that are strobing at the frequencies typically associated with binaural-beat based entrainment. What would happen if I offered (gentle) strobing at frequencies typically associated with trance states along side music intended to help one shake and dance off stress or perhaps even trauma? I am of course well aware that this is not appropriate for people with medical or severe psychological conditions, especially epilepsy, and would warn attendees as to that. All I could really speak to would be the nature of people's experiences with it and the operating theory behind it, but truly I can't make any further claims about it.

There is an open-source binaural beats program called Gnaural. I can't tell if it still works these days, but it used to be an easy way of creating, running, and exporting binaural beat audio files. It has a concept of a "beat frequency," which I believe is the frequency they are trying to entrain to with the binaural beat technique. What if this frequency could be fed into the ganzfield.html or similar to create a configurable strobing effect with the desired (changing) frequency?

Warmly,

Chris Gagné