Legal highs on Amazon – #1: Nitrous Oxide

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Did you know you could buy everything from Peruvian hallucinogen ayahuasca to mescaline-containing San Pedro cactus, all on Amazon?  Since we know why a lot of you use Squareeater, we thought we’d introduce you to other fun available on the Internet!

We thought that before we tackled mind-bending hallucinogens, we’d start with the gateway “cheap high” – nitrous oxide (N2O) aka whip-its aka laughing gas.  While drugs like LSD have only been around for decades, people have been recreationally doing this relatively harmless gas for over two centuries. Its effects aren’t 100% understood, but it is generally thought to cause the release of dopamine (which many stimulants like cocaine also do).

Nitrous oxide is commonly used in making whipped cream, so is readily available commercially in food grade quality.  Do NOT use nitrous oxide for automotive uses as it has other chemicals included to discourage you from getting high as fuck off of it.

Depending on how crazy you and your friends are, it might be advantageous to buy a pack of 600 nitrous charges, although there are plenty of other alternatives.  Once you get your charges, you need to be able to open them to release the gas into a balloon for consumption.  You can go with a cheap “cracker” (which comes with a handy punch-ball balloon) or a more sleek fancy stainless steel 1/2 liter canister.

On the negative side, nitrous oxide is a greenhouse gas, so every lightheaded laughing attack kills the planet a little bit.  Didn’t mean to harsh your mellow :)

We’ll be tackling more of these legal shenanigans in future blog posts, so it might be a good time for you to get our RSS feed.

GZA: Liquid Swords reissue or need a chess set?

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We know here in the second decade of the 21st century, the idea of purchasing music as physical media (or buying it at all) has been lost on a generation.  So, how does the hip-hop music industry get a new generation of music fans to buy a re-issue of the classic solo album Liquid Swords by Wu-Tang member the Genius aka the GZA aka Gary Grice?  They include a muthafuckin’ chess set!

Maybe we just didn’t realize so many kids like to smoke a blunt, throw on “Duel of the Iron Mic”, and then play some mad chess, yo!  Anyone?  As an added bonus, there’s a second CD of instrumentals so that at the party, guys can drunkenly freestyle while annoying the hell out of the ladies.

Hating aside, we’re glad to see that if people are going to put out physical media that they really really do it!  Besides, Liquid Swords is an awesome record.  We’re just not sure how big the Venn diagram of Wu-Tang fans, CD completists, and chess set collectors is.

Buy the GZA: Liquid Swords The Chess Box

Kratom makes the NY Times – Kids, hide your tea!

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We were quite surprised to spot a recent article on kratom in the New York Times of all places! Does this mean that now that the Times is onto this, the DEA is soon to follow? :)

For those of you not familiar with kratom, it is the leaf of a tree native to Thailand traditionally used for medicinal purposes. Often chewed, made into a tea, or taken in powder form, the leaf works as a stimulant at low doses. Strangely enough at higher doses, it is an opiate-like sedative – which is why it is frequently used during opiate withdrawl.

The Times article explains issues with the leaf in Thai society, where it is illegal but widely used (a study of Thai teenagers found that 94% had used kratom!). Interestingly enough, some of the demand for the leaf is from Muslims because of the prohibitions on alcohol. Apparently, the Thai kids are making a “cocktail” of boiled kratom, cough syrup, and Coca-Cola served on the rocks. That makes Lil’ Wayne’s “purple drank” seem more like a hard lemonade!

Here in the United States, you can buy kratom right off of Amazon, in “pimp grade” capsule pill form or as a powder. Have fun kids!

Update: Apparently, Amazon figured out that you could buy kratom directly from their site, so those links don’t point to the goods.  There are some other wacky botanicals still there however… 

Salvia Divinorum leads to jumping out of windows

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This is why we recommend Squareeater over salvia divinorum!  Well not really, but we thought Squareeater users might get a laugh (or a scare) out of this!

Some versions of this on Youtube report this as a second story window, although a door is clearly visible on the right, so it is all in good fun.

Self-portraits while on different drugs

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We’ve been getting a kick out of the work of Bryan Lewis Saunders, an artist who has been doing self-portraits on many, many different kinds of illegal (and legal but ill-advised) substances.  There’s mushrooms (pictured on the left), meth, computer duster, Xanax, PCP, cough syrup or sizzurp, hash, etc..

Apparently, Mr. Saunders does a ton of self-portraits already in different styles, so it is hard to make direct correlations between the substance and the drawing.  However, you can definitely see motor control being impaired and can guess at some of the other effects.

After the jump a few of our favorites, or see the original post from Boombotix.com…

Continue reading →

Brainwave Music: Alvin Lucier – “Music for Solo Performer”

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Being Squareeater mainly focuses on how audio or music can alter brainwaves, we thought it would be fun to also show how brainwaves can be used to create music.

Alvin Lucier’s seminal “Music for Solo Performer” from 1965 has a pretty straightforward set-up.  An EEG connected to the performer’s scalp detects brainwaves which are then amplified by speakers placed upon snare drums.  As Lucier relaxes, the alpha waves (8-12hz) cause the snare to slowly rattle and creak.  The sound would slowly start as he closes his eyes or focuses on making alpha waves, but if he opened his eyes, the sound would stop.  One recent reviewer calls the piece “one of the most direct lifelines between the mind and sound in modern music.”

Lucier isn’t the only composer/artist who worked with this technique.  See David Rosenboom, Manford Eaton, Richard Teitelbaum, Atau Tanaka, and there’s even the Riverbottom Brainwave Band (with Pauline Oliveros).

Buy Alvin Lucier’s Sferics/Music for Solo Performer

The Dream Machine – Brion Gysin and stroboscopic light

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The visuals on Squareeater were largely inspired by Brion Gysin’s “Dream Machine“, which is basically a cylinder with some cut-out shapes that spins on a turntable.  By putting a lightbulb in the center of it, the spinning object causes flickering inducing alpha waves in the brain.  We have plenty more to say about the effects of stroboscopic light which we will save for future posts!

This youtube clips demonstrates the Dream Machine well:

Dream Machine plansIf you can’t afford to actually purchase Brion Gysin’s plans, there are plenty of DIY options out there or just download this PDF of Dream Machine plans!  Basically, all you need is an exacto knife and a large sheet of paper of a decent weight.  Of course, there are people using computerized CNC lathes for this, but DIY will work just as well.

There was a pretty cool Dream Machine iPhone app but it doesn’t seem to be available anymore.  Check out this screenshot though:

Brion Gysin iPhone app screenshot

History Lesson no. 1: Hermann Helmholtz’s “On the Sensations of Tone”

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We figured we should start off our blog by dealing with the field of psychoacoustics – the psychological and physiological responses in the perception of sound.  As we’re not the first to consider the effect of sound on the brain, we wanted to provide some historical information so people might have a better idea of where Squareeater comes from.

Finished in 1863, Hermann Helmholtz’s On the Sensations of Tone is still considered a major text for the study of psychoacoustics.   Don’t misunderstand us, this is a very dry 19th century academic text bridging physics, anatomy, and music theory.  This isn’t sweet cover-to-cover bedtime reading!


Helmholtz spends a fair amount of the book analyzing the vibrations that make up sound.  He examines the anatomy of the ear and how it receives the sound wave.  Musicians would be very interested in his analysis of how different instruments vibrate creating their specific timbres (this particularly gives a lot of insight in harmonics for all you string players out there).

Probably more interesting is his Chapter VII “Combinational Tones” and Chapter VIII “On the Beats of Simple Tones”.  We won’t go into explaining combination/difference tones in this post, but the important thing is they are not a physical phenomenon, but are created by the ear itself!  You hear something that doesn’t exist in the air, but is located in the ear or some research suggests in the brain.

Check out these so-so examples of difference tones:
http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/TitchDemo030417.htm
http://www.sfu.ca/sonic-studio/handbook/Difference_Tone.html

“On the Beats of Simple Tones” goes onto to explain some of the beating properties when two tones close in frequency are heard at the same time – which is what Squareeater is based on.  Now, Helmholtz doesn’t write about binaural beats because headphones weren’t invented yet!


Again this is NOT a light book at all, but we do recommend checking it out if you’re curious how sound and hearing works.  This is particularly useful if you are a musician as it gives a better understanding of instruments, synthesizers, recording, etc..

Since the book is so frigging old it is public domain, so you can download it for free or actually buy it as who wants to read this as a PDF!

Guess what? We launched a blog!

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Since Squareeater’s beta launch in 2011, we’ve been incrementally making the site better, often directly based off of your feedback.

We’ve been doing research on the psychoacoustic effects of audio-visual stimuli much longer than that, and we’d like to share some of this information to our users, not to mention skeptics!

So get our RSS feed, because we think you’ll be interested in what we’ve got to share with you!

Also, drop us a line if there’s a news story or item that you think would be of interest to like-minded people who like to derp their brains on the Internet :)