The Sounds That Get You High

On sale for $199.95 (about €155), “Gate of Hades” is a rather unusual sound file. I-doser, the company that markets it and other digital “doses”, justifies that price by promising some incredible effects it will create. “Expect nightmares, near death experiences, and strong onset of fear,” reads the short description that accompanies the file. If the testimonials of users are to be believed, some of these doses can cause very intense reactions. On the i-doser-x French forum, where a community of 13,000 users gather online, a few were willing to tell their stories.

For the first three minutes, I felt like I was wasting my time. Then all of a sudden, I could see myself in a forest, walking and seeing scenes from my life to my right and my left. Suddenly I’m flying on the magic cloud of San Goku [...] That’s when I fall. Then, I rush towards a white light and wake up with a big smile.

Andreas is a regular visitor to the forum, where the average age hovers around 17 years. He discovered doses “three or four years ago, while wandering around on the Internet“. Impressed with their effects, he’s developed some of his own doses.

You could call it an ecstatic state. I had intense visions, forms of hallucinations. Pulsing lights, dripping colours. The whole episode was accompanied by a great energy, and a great euphoria.

Many teenagers just like Andreas are trying out the experience, and experimenting with different doses. No illegality  is tolerated in conversations on the forum or in the instant messaging service. Just a quick search on Google is all it takes to get hold of a dose.

Inducing visions or sensations by listening to a simple sound may seem surprising, but I-doser are exploiting an as yet little explored field of science: that of binaural beats. Its earliest traces date back to 1839. Heinrich Wilhelm Dove, a Prussian physicist and meteorologist, discovered the phenomenon by playing similar sounds separately into each ear, separated only by a few hertz. The brain, which can’t perceive differences of less than 30Hz, senses the difference between the two frequencies as another beat that sounds like it’s coming from the inside of the head.

In the 1970’s, researchers in the US continued to work on the subject. By combining many frequencies, they managed to generate four distinct types of wave, each of which produces its own specific effects:

> Beta waves: over 13 Hz, correspond to a state of arousal, activity

> Alpha waves: 13 to 8 Hz, good for rest and relaxation

> Theta waves: from 7.5 to 4 Hz, associated with light sleep

> Delta waves: 3.5 to 0.5 Hz, typical of normal and deep sleep

To create these doses, I-doser combine several types of frequencies. For the process to work, the user must be listening with stereo headphones, needed to separate the sounds.

Having become something of a fad, binaural beats continue to puzzle many in the scientific community. The author of a paper on the subject in 2006, clinical psychologist Brigitte Forgeot wanted to prove their effectiveness. To perform her tests, she used a simple software for generating binaural sounds.

During my research, I focused on the alpha waves. I noted the net effects on tension or concentration levels. The therapeutic possibilities are enormous: for the treatment of insomnia, for example. After six weeks of listening, sleep disorders in some patients were resolved.

While Brigitte Forgeot has no hesitation in using this method on her patients, many within traditional medicine remain sceptical of these so-called “digital drugs”. The fault for that may lie with specialist companies who offer certain recreational doses, claiming they can reproduce the effects of drugs such as marijuana or crack.

Brigitte Forgeot finds the term digital drug a little “far-fetched”. According to her:

That’s mostly a marketing tool, to stimulate users’ curiosity. There is no addictive element, and theoretically no risk because it works just to facilitate the production of certain waves in our brain.

The trade in doses by specialist companies represents a profitable trade, with rates between $2 and $200. Those prices seem even more outrageous given that creating a dose is relatively easy, once you understand the basic rules. That’s not something the market leaders are worrying about for now. In an interview with Shock Magazine in late 2010, the president of I-doser claimed the company had several dozen employees and had hit a million downloads.