A trainer for auditory spatial attention
A sound circles your head.
You hold attention on where it is.
Not on what it sounds like — on where. That is a narrower target than the breath, it moves, and you can tell immediately when you have lost it. Ten minutes, headphones, eyes closed.
Headphones required — the whole effect is the difference between your two ears.
The exercise
Attention has somewhere specific to be
Most meditation asks you to attend to something still and internal. Verbenix gives attention a moving target outside your head, and a way to check yourself: if you cannot say where the sound is right now, you were somewhere else.
Deliberately attending to a sound changes activity in auditory cortex within about 50 milliseconds of onset, and the effect appears within seconds of shifting focus. That is the single best-evidenced thing this app asks you to do — and it is the reason the target moves rather than sitting still.
Six 30-minute sessions of spatial-hearing training cut localisation error from 28° to 10° in azimuth. Six people, so treat the direction as credible and the size as unproven. The whole dossier, including what it does not show.
How it is built
The room is a synthesis, not a recording
- Panning
- HRTF
- measured head response, per ear
- Room
- 6 + tail
- early reflections, taken pre-panner
- Ears at
- y = 0
- floor −0.80 m · ceiling +1.95 m
- Sources
- 7
- ocean · rain · stream · bowls · drone · blend · om
- Paths
- 6
- one shared table drives sound and picture
- Figure
- 47k tris
- ear level at 0.855 of its height
Early reflections and the reverb tail branch off before the binaural panner, so the room stays put while the direct sound moves. The falling ratio between the two is what your ear reads as distance. Every motion path is one set of coefficients consumed by both the audio and the drawing, so what you hear and what you see cannot drift apart.
Claims we will not make
The sales pitch we deliberately skipped
A 528 Hz sound wave is metres long and cannot interact with a nanometre-scale molecule. There is no mechanism to argue about. A pure tone is also the single worst stimulus for this app — it carries almost none of the cues your ears use to place a sound — so Verbenix never uses one as the moving source.
- That any specific hertz value heals, repairs, or unblocks anything.
- That the app entrains brainwaves, or that a stated Hz puts you in theta.
- That it treats anxiety, insomnia, ADHD, or Alzheimer’s disease.
- That elevation and front/back will be as vivid as left/right. They will not be.
Ten minutes is enough to tell.
Nothing to install, nothing to sign up for. Put headphones on, set the level so you could still hear someone speak to you, and press play.
Start a session