Music, Technology & the New Wave of Psychedelic Technology
24th August 2021 - Edited by Jimmy Kyriacou
The Psychedelic Renaissance is not a matter of simple progress, but of profound processes leading to a total transformation of our healthcare, culture and consciousness. The first full-scale scientific studies in decades are once again demonstrating this & its use is now evangelised by leading scientists & pioneers from some of the world's most reputable institutions.
Psychedelic use itself, is of course, interwoven throughout the development of human culture for thousands of years & never really went away. It simply went underground, out of majority consciousness.
Music is also a crucial part of the psychedelic experience too & we are now hearing more about the importance of sound thanks to several new tech companies that are designing music for psychedelic therapy.
‘Music has a key role to play in this new psychedelic renaissance too - it’s just less spoken about… for now.’
Two specific companies : UK based WAVEPATHS & another, a collaboration between MINDCURE a Vancouver psychedelic therapy software company and LUCID - a Toronto digital music therapy platform, are both edging music back toward the centre of the psychedelic experience.
READ : THE TECHNEDELIC REVOLUTION by DON ESTES
If you look at the historical and cultural practice of psychedelics, you’ll see that the music has been part of the traditions since the beginning of time, It’s only that we’re returning to utilising this medicine in a clinical setting that the music component has become recognised again as an important part of the entire healing process.
Ibogaine ceremonies in central Africa, which incorporate high BPM (beats per minute) music that is thought to help people deal with the intensity of this stimulant psychedelic (albeit, somewhat counter-intuitively).
In the ayahuasca ceremonies that originated in rainforest regions of South America, shamans generally sing “icaros” (magic songs, translated), which are specifically developed for the ritual involving that drug. If you’ve ever done ayahuasca in the Amazon — it’s hard not to come away with a sense that shamans are, in fact, controlling aspects of the journey with their singing.
These tech companies have been working on custom tracks for most of the different psychedelic drugs currently being explored for their therapeutic potential: ketamine, psilocybin mushrooms, MDMA (a.k.a. ecstasy) and San Pedro, a cactus that grows in the Andes and contains mescaline. These are part of the music streams available on Mindcure’s soon-to-be-released app, iSTRYM, a platform that offers therapists (and clients) resources such as protocols, data analysis and mindfulness practices to support psychedelic-assisted therapies.
It’s one thing to tailor music to a “molecule” (the word many people in the psychedelics business use to refer to the drugs) and another to customise it for the client undergoing psychedelic-assisted therapy. Mindcure wanted this individualised approach, though, and fortunately Lucid could help with this as well.
Thanks to algorithms, artificial intelligence and years of research into how our brains respond to different music, they were able to create technology that would allow a therapist to become an “emotional DJ” who can drive the experience, similar to the way the shamans do in the Amazon rainforest.
“We’re basically providing them with an interface so that therapists can steer the experience according to the arc that they want,” explains Frank Russo, Lucid’s chief science officer and professor of psychology and neuroscience at Ryerson University.
So the therapist might say, ‘We’re going to have a 30-minute session and I want to start out with low arousal music and then, 20 minutes in, I want to be having a high arousal and positive mood phase, and then I want the session to resolve in a calm space.’
Russo has spent years immersed in research at Ryerson’s SMART Lab (Science of Music, Auditory Research and Technology) to determine how music regulates mood, both in terms of type of music and sequence of music (a.k.a. a playlist). Using something called a “two-dimensional model of emotion arousal,” his work makes it possible to classify and program music so that the emotional deejay/therapist can help regulate the patient’s mood with a “joystick” of sorts that can move the session in various directions to (hopefully) elicit breakthroughs.
This all sounds pretty advanced but, as Russo and Ramsden both point out, it’s just fine-tuning things that we’ve known about for ages.
The first reference to music influencing emotions goes back to Pythagoras, an ancient Greek philosopher who observed a man be moved from rage to absolute calm when the rhythm of the music changed.
And with psychedelics, whether through shamans who steer the sacred journey with traditional music or via Jerry Garcia and company, who influenced countless trips at thousands of Grateful Dead shows, the two have always gone hand in hand.
‘Music has been a part of psychedelic-assisted therapy and research the whole time, but the way music is being included has changed tremendously,” says Ramsden, noting that there’s a well-known JOHNS HOPKINS PLAYLIST that is widely circulated outside of the research hospital. “What we wanted was something that could help the therapist drive the sentiment of the patient with music.’
So, this time around, the music is still playing a role, but it’s likely to be highly informed by neuroscience and music therapy.
EDITED FROM ORIGINAL RESEARCH & REPORT BY Christine Sismondo