CHANNELS INSPIRED BY NATURE
There is no doubt that sounds of nature have positive effects on our minds. That's why we’ve chosen only natural sounds as a base for your ambient soundscapes. Waves lapping on the sea shore, birds chirping, wind playing in the trees. All this evokes feelings with psychological benefits, from nostalgia to optimism, social connectedness and self-esteem.
Earth
Sounds of forest, birds singing, everything is alive with the music of nature, filling your heart with happiness.
Wind
Freedom for your mind. Meditate with sound of wind generated by filtering from white noise. Drift into enchanted lands.
Water
Allow the ocean waves to touch your emotions.
Slow down and relax. This channel contains natural white noise to help you sleep.
Fire
Travel to space and escape the ordinary with this combination of reverb and filtered white noise. Enjoy playful creativity.
SYNTH & EFFECTS ENGINES
Reverb
In the real world, reverberation is created when a sound or signal is reflected from and absorbed by the surfaces of objects in the space
– which could include furniture, people, and air - causing a large number of reflections to build up and then decay. In Glo, this effect is
simulated by repeating small chunks of recorded audio over and over. There are channels that combine this with low-pass filters that you can
tune up or down by tilting the whale, so only a certain part of the spectrum is processed.
Granular Sampler
Recorded audio is split into pieces, called grains. Multiple grains may be layered on top of each other, and play at different speeds,
phases, volume, and frequency. Some of these parameters are influenced by tilting the whale, for example left-right direction typically selects
major or minor chord and increases stereo spread. Tilting to front and back increases or decreases amount of grains. There is also a control
for detuning so you can get far away from the initial melodic chords.
MI Clouds
This channel is based on the famous Eurorack module "Clouds" made by Émilie Gillet of Mutable Instruments, implemented here under
the permission of its open-source license - big thank you, Émilie!
It contains a handful of patches that do very interesting sound processing, mainly consisting of pitch-shifting, reverb
and resonant filtering. This is a very simple demo showing the patches that existed in the v1 Glo; the v2 model will
contain a few more of them..
Infinite Looper
This channel runs two digital "tape loops", a short one and a long one - typically 10 and 1.25 seconds (so the short one
repeats 8 times while the long one loops once). The recorded stereophonic sound is written to both, and read by 4 "play heads".
Two of them travel at normal speed over the loops, two travel at a half and a double speed over the short loop,
pitch-shifting the sound up and down by an octave. By rotating the whale, you can control mixing ratios of all 4 play heads,
changing how rich the composition should be and how much should the signal pitch-shift up, down, or both ways at the same time.
By turning the whale upside down you can reverse the direction of the long loop. The sound decays over long time so it is easy to
build up many layers on top of each other.
BINAURAL BEATS
Listening to binaural beats for 30 minutes daily has been shown to help reduce stress and anxiety.
A binaural beat is an auditory illusion perceived when you hear two different waves with slightly different frequency, one through each ear. Your brain then recognizes this difference as a third tone, in addition to the two pure tones presented to each ear:
They were discovered by Heinrich Wilhelm Dove in 1839, who published his findings in the scientific journal Repertorium der Physik.
The subject remained something of a scientific curiosity until 134 years later, with the publishing of Gerald Oster's article
"Auditory beats in the brain" (Scientific American, 1973). Oster's article identified and assembled the scattered pieces
of relevant research since Dove, offering fresh insight (and new laboratory findings) to research on binaural beats.
Source: Wikipedia [1] and [2]
To activate the binaural beats mode first choose sound channel and then simply press Binaural button. One of the 5 red LEDs will light up, indicating which binaural program is active. To cycle between the programs, or to disable this mode completely, use the same button.
Although each channel has a default binaural program defined - we selected a soundscape background that we thought sounds most pleasant with the given frequency range - you can of course select a different one if you prefer.
There are five basic types of brain waves that can be triggered by a binaural beats program. They are defined by a frequency at which neural signals oscillate:
- Alpha: 7.5 to 12.5 Hz, good for relaxation
- Beta: 12.5 to 30 Hz, help with concentration
- Delta: 0.5 to 4 Hz, helps with dreamless deep sleep
- Theta: 4 to 7 Hz, helps to achieve deep meditation and boost creativity
- Gamma: 30 to 100 Hz, help to improve mental clarity and increase focus.
We recommend you use this option sitting or lying down with your eyes closed. Do not overdo it if you are just starting, it is quite a workout for your brain and you need to give it time to adapt. Just 10 minutes is enough in the beginning.