How Does Sound Impact Sleep?
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What is it about sound that can soothe a baby to sleep? Why do some of us prefer the background noise of a ticking clock or a fan while we sleep?
These are questions that I have contemplated over the years and I could not pinpoint why until I went to school with my curiosity about the impact of sounds.
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Without diving into the science of sound too deeply, I would like to explain a few things that pertains to our brain activity in response to sounds, vibrations and frequencies.
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Frequencies/Hertz (Hz):
Simply stated, the number of sound waves that occur per second. The faster the sound wave per second, the higher the frequency, the higher pitch of the sound.
We don't hear every frequency. Some are too low, some too high. When we hear multi-layered frequencies, we are mostly not even aware that we're listening to many at one time. Often times, this can be damaging on a sub-conscious level, and other times it can be very beneficial.
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In Sound Therapy, we combine frequencies that in knowing the hertz of two different instruments, we can allow for an unconscious frequency to be processed by the brain and this is alternatively known as Binaural Beats.
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For example, Binaural beats combines a hertz of 442 Hz with another instrument that plays at 446 Hz, leaving the difference of 4 Hz. The 4 Hz is scientifically known to access the brain's delta waves, thus inducing deep sleep.
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