athletic Alpha band
Pre-Performance Peak State
8.5 Hz beat · 440 Hz carrier · 3 phases · 20 min · intermediate
Twenty minutes at the alpha floor, built for the hour before something rather than for the thing itself.
The beat and carrier in the heading are the main phase — the part of the session it was built around. They are not what plays for the whole length. Every programme here opens in the alpha band, wherever it is going afterwards, and most come back up before they finish. The full phase plan is on this page, and it is the honest picture of what you would actually hear.
Hear it
Thirty seconds rendered at the parameters of the phase named above — not an excerpt cut from a finished file, because sessions are built to order and yours does not exist yet. The figures the player draws are computed from the audio or from plate mathematics; none of them is a measurement of your hearing.
What this actually is
Eight and a half hertz sits just inside alpha, a half step above its boundary. It is the settling end of the band rather than the alert end — which is the opposite of what the name might lead you to expect, and is deliberate.
Alpha runs from eight to thirteen hertz. It is the most-studied band in the consumer category and the one people usually mean when they say brainwave audio, which also makes it the band with the most overstated marketing around it.
The full phase plan
Three phases across twenty minutes, and it deliberately ends faster than its middle: ten hertz to centre, eight and a half for the eight-minute main phase, then fourteen for the last seven. The quiet part is in the middle. The session is built to leave you active, not settled.
| Phase | Role | When | Beat | Band | Carrier |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Center | induction | 0–5 min | 10 Hz | Alpha | 432 Hz |
| Visualisation | main | 5–13 min | 8.5 Hz | Alpha | 440 Hz |
| Activation | emergence | 13–20 min | 14 Hz | Beta | 528 Hz |
Where the 440 Hz carrier comes from
Standard concert pitch. The A above middle C as standardised internationally, and the reference nearly every instrument you have heard is tuned to.
This one is simply a standard. It carries no tradition and claims nothing, which is exactly why it is used where a neutral carrier is wanted.
The carrier is the pitch you actually hear. The binaural difference — the part that makes this a structured session rather than a tone — lives between the two channels and is set by the beat, not by the carrier. Choosing one carrier over another is a tonal choice, the way picking a key is a tonal choice. It is not a functional one.
What this does not claim
There is no performance effect here and none is claimed. Nothing about this has been tested with athletes, in competition, or against any measure of performance. The name describes when somebody might use it.
Who it is for
The waiting time before something you have already trained for.
Nothing here is for sale yet. These are the starting points a session can be built from, published so you can see the whole range before anything is priced.