While I can't say I've done serious research, I have hacked around with synthesizing different noise types using a synth, and there is a concept called "entrainment," which I understood as getting your brain to focus on reconciling and cohering related sound or light stimuli. There are triggers for it, where there are just enough sensory cribs to imply coherence that you think you can interpret it, but of course since it's random, you can't, and that state of expectation absorbs your attention, distracting it from obsessive thoughts.
For some people, listening to Bach is like hearing another conversation where it becomes hard to form responses to someone actually trying to talk to them over the music. That's probably true for any music they like, but there may be a level of complexity that "entrains" the mind by submitting its buffering and cohering mechanisms to rhythmic boundaries that prevent it from focusing on other stimuli.
The woo around "binaural beats," is related, where by playing a different tone in each ear that is only offset by a few Hz, the ability of our brain to tell the difference between them (or not) oscillates and we apparently "hear" low frequency beats and harmonics as artifacts of this clipping or that do not appear on a spectrograph. The relationship of the frequency of this clipping or beats is has a sort of backfit horoscopyness about how different frequencies "activate" different cognitive abilities. However, it's surprisingly less bullshitty than it sounds. Since the frequency of the beats resembles natural electrical impulse rhythms in the brain during sleep, (owing to the beats being literal artifacts of gaps in the brain's processing and not of the sounds themselves) there has been some very interesting art and research into what messing with what are essentially just signal processing limits might mean.
Max Richter's "Sleep" concert was designed using similar principles, but instead of synthesized tones, the sounds are composed and performed live in music over 8.5 hours. (https://www.maxrichtermusic.com/albums/sleep/) Once it clicks that you can create these massive washing harmonic effects that overwhelm the senses with classical instruments and live musicians, the cult of Wagner starts to make sense. (e.g. the Das Rheingold Prelude).
People use white noise generator programs to put babies to sleep, and I think there is a lot of interesting art to be made using the entrainment concept that runs through brownian and 1/f noise, to wall of sound music.
For some people, listening to Bach is like hearing another conversation where it becomes hard to form responses to someone actually trying to talk to them over the music. That's probably true for any music they like, but there may be a level of complexity that "entrains" the mind by submitting its buffering and cohering mechanisms to rhythmic boundaries that prevent it from focusing on other stimuli.
The woo around "binaural beats," is related, where by playing a different tone in each ear that is only offset by a few Hz, the ability of our brain to tell the difference between them (or not) oscillates and we apparently "hear" low frequency beats and harmonics as artifacts of this clipping or that do not appear on a spectrograph. The relationship of the frequency of this clipping or beats is has a sort of backfit horoscopyness about how different frequencies "activate" different cognitive abilities. However, it's surprisingly less bullshitty than it sounds. Since the frequency of the beats resembles natural electrical impulse rhythms in the brain during sleep, (owing to the beats being literal artifacts of gaps in the brain's processing and not of the sounds themselves) there has been some very interesting art and research into what messing with what are essentially just signal processing limits might mean.
Max Richter's "Sleep" concert was designed using similar principles, but instead of synthesized tones, the sounds are composed and performed live in music over 8.5 hours. (https://www.maxrichtermusic.com/albums/sleep/) Once it clicks that you can create these massive washing harmonic effects that overwhelm the senses with classical instruments and live musicians, the cult of Wagner starts to make sense. (e.g. the Das Rheingold Prelude).
People use white noise generator programs to put babies to sleep, and I think there is a lot of interesting art to be made using the entrainment concept that runs through brownian and 1/f noise, to wall of sound music.