A binaural beat constructed from a noise (L).

The binaural beat has been used for over 100 years as a stimulus for generating the percept of motion. Classically the beat consists of a pure tone at one ear (e.g., 500 Hz) and the same pure tone at the other ear but shifted upward or downward in frequency (e.g., 501 Hz). An experiment and binaural computational analysis are reported which demonstrate that a more powerful motion percept can be obtained by applying the concept of the frequency shift to a noise, via an upward or downward shift in the frequency of the Fourier components of its spectrum.