Ben Adlin, writing for Marijuana Moment:
Analyzing a 10-person trial involving the use of psilocybin therapy to help people quit smoking tobacco, the Johns Hopkins team compared sessions featuring classical music with those involving overtone-based music, featuring instruments such as gongs, Tibetan singing bowls or the didgeridoo, among others.
“Although we found no significant differences between the two musical genres studied here,” the team wrote, “several trends suggested that the overtone-based playlist resulted in somewhat better outcomes and was preferred by a larger portion of this small sample of participants.”
In other words, while the results don’t prove that overtone-based music yields better outcomes than classical, the findings nevertheless “call into question whether Western classical music typically played in psychedelic sessions holds unique benefit.”
For a long time many people have held the opinion that classical music is optimal for psychedelic therapy. This new study out of Johns Hopkins didn’t find evidence to support that claim.
In my own psychedelic practice I have experimented with a wide variety of musical genres, including classical, jazz, ambient, electronic, hip hop, metal, bluegrass, and many more. I have found some of them to be more capable of engendering a therapeutic experience than others, especially those that have little-to-no lyrical content. It’s definitely worth experimenting with different types of music during your psychedelic journeys in my opinion, and if you’re not up for curating your own music then there are a ton of psychedelic therapy music playlists out there to check out.