AmbiScience-Brain Power

AmbiScience from Tesla Software is a combined ambient music player and brain wave synchronization app for your iPhone or iPod Touch.. What is brain wave synchronization you ask? It is the practice of entraining brainwave frequency to fall into step with periodic stimuli corresponding to an intended brain state, e.g. sleep. AmbiScience uses isochronic beats, evenly spaced tone bursts, to achieve these effects. Hearing these beats does not require headphones--a purported improvement over software that utilizes binaural beats. Indeed the tones are audible with the phone docked on my nightstand, where this program plays each and every night since it was released.

AmbiScience BP includes 11 high quality sound tracks including personal favorites like Desert Sunrise, The Power Plant and Tesla's Lab. The sound effects are smooth and rich without audible looping; no crickets chirping or crackling fires here! The impressive musical effects are reason alone to use AmbiScience. Upon launching the application you choose the desired sound effect using a scroll wheel and pressing the 'play' key. Entrainment effects can be added on a separate screen accessed by pressing the large button at the top of the main screen. There is also an optional timer which fades the sound effects at the set time. It continues to play after your device is asleep but cannot play in the background, an unfortunate limitation placed upon the developers by Apple.

The program has a nice user interface. My one quibble is that the volume slider can be difficult to use; the button is small and not uniformly responsive. Also AmbiScience takes up and impressive 80 MB on your device, which can be quite a commitment depending on your storage capacity. It is best installed onto your computer and synchronized over to your device as over the air downloading is very slow.

So does it work? My answer is--who knows? This may be pseudoscience at its worst but plenty of people attest to brain wave entrainment's efficacy. All I can say for sure is that the sound effects are awesome and background sounds do have useful 'noise canceling' effects which can help us sleep and concentrate. There is a lite version of AmbiScience BP available to try for free. But you can probably find $0.99 hiding in the cushions of your couch and when you do, spend it on this great app.