In case you don't know what it is, there's an article here with a sound clip sample. Wikipedia This would be pretty cool in games! I haven't seen it mentioned much before but if it is used in any games already I'd love to see one. To implement it, it would seem that you'd have to have two "ears" on the camera and calculate the difference of two distances from the ears to the source. Then offset the sounds being played through each side of the headset. It would be hard to change the source location because you'd have to speed up and slow down each channel. Anyone attempted this before?

It is cool, and it can create very interesting effects, but you do understand binaural tones can basically kill your body tissues if abused?

And it doesn't take much, if the difference is 25 or over, your brain starts "working" very fast, and basically your metabolism shoots up to unhealthy levels.

The difference between tones forces your cerebellum (I think) to work at the speed of the difference. This effect can make the listener feel a certain level of energy, whether it be sleepy or excited. Again, if it too high, you will basically start frying your body.

Regardless, I'm talking about the negative aspects. You just have to watch for what you're doing with them. As for realtime calculations, I'm not sure the cost of a "binaural cycle" would be.

Should I be wearing a tin foil hat?

Sounds like urban legend claptrap to me. References?

http://www.alphadynamics.com/Binauralsound.htm

Doesn't mention the Gamma state, which is the one you have to worry about. If you get into Gamma, your metabolism shoots up. I was talking to a friend about that one. Let me try to go find a source for that.

Here we go:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binaural_beats

That talks about Gamma.

*EDIT*

I am unable to find a source talking about higher differences in the frequency, but I think that we can both agree that if I were to continue up the ladder of "consciousness" and "alertness," I would overwork my body.

Er... that's a little bit scary. I don't think I'll be trying any more experiments in Sound Forge like that anymore... [oh]

I've used binaural beats several times before for relaxation/meditation. They are very helpful, and useful. A good way to increase concious/subconcious communication. It serves other purposes too, most commonly as a sleep aid.

As long as you don't make the difference too large and listen to the sound continuously, you will be fine. It's when your brain's cycle adjusts to something far too high for it.

Still sounds questionable to me. Although I can agree that various frequencies can affect the brain in different ways, the idea of a sound causing your brain to go into meltdown is a bit too sci-fi for me to believe without stronger references.

Well... "Binaural sounds" is different from "Binaural beats", right?

Here's wikipedia's example of binaural sounds... Now wouldn't that be cool in a first person shooter? Then you could actually tell where other players/enemies were.

To be honest I don't really hear much of a difference between straight stereo and this... except binaural sounds seem to have a slight echo. I don't really see a reason to use it especially since it would take effort to compute.

IMO the current stereo/surround models work just fine, and in terms of quality, are superior to this method.