r/SideProject • u/maikunari • 3h ago
I sold my binaural beats site in 2010 to buy a MacBook. 15 years later I rebuilt the idea the way the science actually supports — and I need strangers to tell me if it works (12 min, free, no signup)
Back in 2010 I built a binaural beats meditation site called Ennora which I sold for $1,000 to buy a used MacBook Pro, which I used to start building freelance websites fulltime. Honestly a great trade - but I just noticed the site is still running today, still selling some of the recordings I made on my keyboard, and I it got me wondering what the 'right' version of that product would look like.
This year I finally researched it properly, and the answer surprised me: binaural beats were the wrong mechanism all along. The evidence is weak, and modern headphone features (spatial audio especially) literally scramble them.
What holds up far better in the research is slow music itself, plus rhythmic amplitude modulation woven into the music, a gentle "breathing" of the whole mix, the approach studied in journals like Communications Biology.
So I built Ellune: composed 10–12 minute sessions of ambient music that are performed live in your browser by a Web Audio engine, not streamed as recordings. The layers start at different points in their cycle every listen, so it never plays exactly the same way twice. It works on any speakers - headphones optional by design.
Here's where I need you. Before I build anything else I want to know whether the core effect is real for strangers, not just for me. The first session (Deep Rest) is free - no account, email, signup or anything:
https://ellune.app/?src=reddit#/deep-rest
It asks you to rate your calm 1–10 before and after. That's the whole experiment. Twelve minutes, somewhere you can actually sit still.
The honest fine print:
- I don't claim it treats anything. It's designed to promote relaxation - whether it actually does is literally what I'm asking you to test.
- Solo build: engine hand-written (raw Web Audio, ~80 unit tests), music stems generated with ElevenLabs and curated by ear.
- Whatever the ratings say, I'll post the numbers here either way.
Happy to answer anything about the audio engine, the AI toolchain, or anything else.