Five minutes is not enough. It takes 20, at least.
You have to be in a quiet environment where you can focus on the sound. Also, I've found better results with isochronic tones. Binaural beats pretty much mandate headphones and, even then, if you're in a noisy environment or there are defects in the headphones that have one side louder than the other, it can be quite "off".
It definitely alters consciousness, but I don't know if there's anything magical about beats per se, because drumming has been used to similar effects for thousands of years. Whether it does so by entraining the brainwaves, that I don't know. It seems like a reasonable guess, but the brain is far too complex for one to assume that such a thing as "an alpha state" exists: we actually have multiple frequencies at all times, and variation around the brain, and we're just starting to develop the technical capability to look at the complexity of all this.
You have to be in a quiet environment where you can focus on the sound. Also, I've found better results with isochronic tones. Binaural beats pretty much mandate headphones and, even then, if you're in a noisy environment or there are defects in the headphones that have one side louder than the other, it can be quite "off".
It definitely alters consciousness, but I don't know if there's anything magical about beats per se, because drumming has been used to similar effects for thousands of years. Whether it does so by entraining the brainwaves, that I don't know. It seems like a reasonable guess, but the brain is far too complex for one to assume that such a thing as "an alpha state" exists: we actually have multiple frequencies at all times, and variation around the brain, and we're just starting to develop the technical capability to look at the complexity of all this.