Generated. Live. Offline.
Binaural beats, made while you listen
Every mode in Sonen carries a binaural beat. It is not a recording playing underneath the music. The two tones that make it are generated on your device, at exact frequencies, for as long as you listen.
Hear it now in your browser — free, no account. Put headphones on first.
What a binaural beat is
Play one steady tone into your left ear and another, a few hertz higher, into your right. Neither ear hears a beat: each hears a single note. What you hear is a slow pulse at the difference between the two — 96 Hz in one ear and 98.5 Hz in the other is heard as a beat two and a half times a second.
That is why headphones matter. Through a speaker both ears hear both tones, the two mix in the air, and the effect is lost. Sonen has a switch for this under the play button: on Speaker, the sound is voiced for a phone or laptop and the beat is left to the headphones.
The beat in each mode
The rates are named, as they usually are, by the band they fall in.
Rest — 2.5 Hz, delta. Under brown noise and a low
drone.
Renew — 10 Hz, alpha. Under a warming pad and scattered
rain.
Flow — 14 Hz, beta. Under steady filtered noise, with
almost no melody to follow.
Balance — 6 Hz, theta. Under a mix that rises and falls at
5.5 breaths a minute.
Melodic — 12 Hz, alpha. Quietly, beneath the chords and the
melody.
Move — 16 Hz, beta. Quietly, beneath the drums and the
bass.
Liminal — 5 Hz, theta. Beneath held chords heard from a
distance, for members.
Some soundscapes within a mode move the beat a little — Rest has one at 2 Hz, Flow one at 15 — so that each has its own character.
Why made live, rather than recorded
Most binaural beats you can find are audio files: a track of a set length that loops when it ends. Sonen has no files. The beat is two oscillators running on your device, so there is no loop point, no length, and nothing to download or stream. A session can run for eight hours and the beat is as exact at the end as at the start.
It also means the beat keeps going with the connection off. Turn on aeroplane mode and nothing changes.
And it sits inside a whole piece of sound rather than on its own. A bare binaural beat is two sine tones, which is not much to listen to for an hour. In Sonen it is one layer among noise beds, drones, pads, melody or drums, mixed low enough that you stop noticing it is there.
What we will not tell you
We will not tell you what a sound will do for you. You will find plenty of places that promise sleep, focus or calm from a particular number of hertz. The research is inconclusive, and a promise we could not honour would go against everything Sonen stands for.
We describe what is playing — the rate, the band, and what it sits under. You decide how it makes you feel. After all, you know your body and your mind better than anyone.
The free tier is the whole instrument for twenty minutes a session, so there is nothing to take on trust.
Written 21 September 2026