Beats or noise for focus?

These get compared as if they were competitors. They are not really doing the same job.

Noise solves a room problem

Broadband noise works by masking. A steady wash of sound raises the floor so that the intermittent, informative sounds around you — a conversation, a door, a notification — stop punching through as separate events.

That is a real and well-understood effect, and it has nothing to do with brainwaves. If your problem is that you can hear your flatmate's phone call, noise is the correct tool and the frequency of anything is irrelevant.

The color matters mostly for comfort. White is flat and can feel harsh over hours; pink falls about 3 dB per octave and is the one most people tolerate longest; brown falls 6 dB and reads as a low rumble.

Beats address an attention problem

A modulated tone is not primarily masking anything. It is a periodic stimulus, and the claim is that periodic stimulus produces time-locked activity in the auditory system, which may make a particular state easier to hold.

The honest state of that claim: the physical part is solid — a tone modulated at a steady rate produces a measurable, sustained response. Whether that response translates into better concentration is much less settled. A 2019 meta-analysis across 22 studies found a significant pooled effect on memory, attention, anxiety and pain, with a moderate effect size. A 2023 systematic review of EEG studies found the entrainment mechanism itself inconsistent — five studies supporting it, eight contradicting it.

So: promising, not proven. Which is a good reason to pick sessions you enjoy listening to rather than sessions with the most impressive-sounding frequency.

The practical answer: use both

Almost every session in this library already is both. There is a modulated carrier and, underneath it, a noise bed — with the color and level specified per session rather than bolted on.

That is not a compromise. It is the combination the 2025 parametric study found most effective for attention: a beat on a low carrier, masked with noise. The noise handles your room. The modulation does whatever it does. And practically, the bed makes the pulse far less fatiguing to sit with for an hour than a bare tone would be.

How to choose in the moment

• Loud environment, simple work. Lean on the bed. Pick a session with a heavier noise level and a slow, shallow modulation so nothing demands attention.
• Quiet environment, hard work. The bed matters less. A cleaner session with a defined beat is more pleasant, and there is less to mask.
• You keep drifting off-task. Try the SMR and low-beta range (roughly 12–15 Hz) rather than high beta. Faster is not more focused; high-beta sessions can read as agitating if you are already wired.
• You are anxious rather than distracted. Go the other way — alpha, and a slower session. Anxiety is where the binaural literature is actually strongest.