Promoting Relaxation Using Monaural Beats With Ultralow-Frequency Inaudible Sounds: An Empirical Case Study

Abstract

Given the high pressures of life in modern society, promoting relaxation can improve the quality of daily life. This study proposes a relaxation system that uses monaural beats with ultralow-frequency inaudible sounds to promote relaxation. To effectively promote relaxation, monaural beats in the $\delta $ band, $\theta $ band, and $\alpha $ band were used and evaluated. To avoid directly influencing people’s activities, the frequencies of the stimulation sounds, which were used to generate the target beats, were out of the frequency range of people’s hearing sense. To examine the performance of the proposed approaches, a subjective testing procedure was designed, and paired-sample $t$ tests were performed. The $p$ values for the experimental relaxation results with monaural beats in the $\delta $ band, $\theta $ band, and $\alpha $ band were 0.0001, 0.1195, and 0.0065, respectively. Furthermore, the experimental results revealed specific effects of the proposed relaxation system; for example, the $\delta $ band had the greatest effect regardless of whether the average, variance, or $p$ value was assessed. On the basis of our experimental results, the proposed relaxation system model can help promote relaxation.

Keywords

• Audio
• brain waves
• binaural beats
• monaural beats
• relaxation
• resonance