Science & Evidence
Sound and wellbeing is a topic where marketing often runs ahead of evidence. This page keeps four things apart so you can judge each one for yourself — and tells you plainly where the evidence stops.
1. What the technology does
This part is engineering, not medicine.
Tones are generated live
Your browser synthesises clean tones with the Web Audio API, a standard browser interface for creating and shaping sound. No pre-recorded frequency audio is downloaded.
Devices have limits
Digital audio can only represent tones below half its sample rate, and small speakers reproduce very low tones poorly or not at all. Human hearing is usually quoted as roughly 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz, and the upper end declines with age.
Why we label sessions
For that reason WaveRemedy plays only what a browser can produce accurately. A session with a tone outside about 20–20,000 Hz is marked “Reference only” rather than being squeezed, shifted or partly played. Sessions that include tones below 20 Hz are still played exactly as listed; whether a particular phone or pair of headphones reproduces such very low tones is a matter of the hardware — which is why we ask you never to raise the volume to hear a quiet session.
Stereo sessions
Some sessions play three tones at the same time: one in both ears, one in the right ear only and one in the left ear only. Each tone is played exactly as listed, including very low ones; whether a speaker or headphone can reproduce a very low tone is a physical property of the device. Whether any of this has an effect on a listener is a research question, not something the technology itself shows.
Background reading: Web Audio API (MDN Web Docs)
2. What independent research says
Real studies on music and sound interventions exist, but a study on one kind of intervention says little about a different product. The same word — “frequency” — does not mean the same intervention.
How we add research here: each item lists the study type, the population, the comparison, the result, its limits and its relevance to WaveRemedy — including results that were neutral or mixed. We only summarise a paper after we have opened and read the original.
No verified research summaries have been published yet.
How to read this evidence
- Music is not a frequency list. Most studies test music people can recognise and enjoy; a tone generated from a list is a different thing, and results do not transfer automatically.
- Many outcomes are self-reported (how well someone felt they slept, how anxious they felt). People cannot be blinded to whether they are listening to music, which can inflate results.
- Small studies, short follow-up and a single setting (for example, patients around surgery) limit what can be concluded for healthy people listening at home.
- A statistically significant result is not proof of a benefit that matters in daily life, and none of these studies tested WaveRemedy.
- We read abstracts and official pages, not always full papers; each item says so. Nothing on this page is medical advice.
3. Where our session data comes from
A title or a tone list in our library is not clinical evidence.
Origin
The tone lists come from a single private dataset supplied to us. We imported all 1,437 entries and keep each entry’s original identifier so it can always be traced back.
What we changed
Not a single tone. Fifteen entries had text that had leaked between fields in the source (for example a title cut off mid-sentence); we repaired them using only the text of those same entries, and two more titles are flagged for review. Tones are never added, altered, shifted or removed.
What the dataset is not
It does not say why a tone list is associated with a topic, and its presence in a dataset is not evidence that it does anything. The topics you browse by are our own editorial organisation, not part of the source.
Playability
Entries with any tone above 20,000 Hz, and entries that only point to another entry, are kept for completeness but are “Reference only”.
4. Evidence about WaveRemedy itself
None yet.
There is currently no independent, published study of WaveRemedy, of this collection of sessions, or of listening to them through phone speakers and headphones — and we have not run one ourselves. If we ever run or cite such a study it will appear here in full, including results that showed no benefit.
Our claims policy
- We will not say WaveRemedy treats, cures, diagnoses or prevents any condition.
- We will not use phrases such as “clinically proven” or show invented statistics, testimonials or certificates.
- We will not treat a study of one intervention as proof for another.
- We will correct this page when we learn something new.