Music for Psilocybin Therapy and the Temporal Arc of Psychedelic Experience
Juan Sebastián Gómez-Cañón, Carly Leininger, Danielle Mayall, Robert F. Dougherty, Daniel L. Bowling
preprint DOI: 10.21203/rs.3.rs-10403919/v1 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Observational study |
|---|---|
| Population | 369 music tracks from eight psilocybin therapy playlists |
| Topics | Psilocybin Psychedelic-assisted therapy |
| Key findings | The playlists show only weak phase-based acoustic and affective differentiation, mostly within individual playlists, and lack consistent onset–peak–return structure overall. The authors argue that current curatorial practices are not aligned with their theoretical basis. |
Abstract
Abstract Music plays a central role in psilocybin therapy (PT), where playlists are designed to be supportive and stimulating over a 4–6-hour psychedelic experience. The primary design principle underlying PT music programming is that music should be affectively aligned with the onset–peak–return model of pharmacodynamic action. However, in the absence of clear acoustic criteria, this framework has been implemented largely through individual or team-based curatorial judgment, making it unclear whether contemporary research PT playlists consistently realize the proposed onset–peak–return progression. Here, we test this question by analyzing 46.9 hours of audio from eight PT music playlists (369 tracks) for systematic acoustic and affective organization across onset, peak, and return phases. To this end, we applied supervised and unsupervised machine learning approaches to a comprehensive set of audio features extracted from PT music playlist tracks, evaluating phase differentiation across the full dataset as well as within individual playlists. The results demonstrate that although weak phase-based differentiation is apparent for low-level audio features, especially within some playlists, the overall set lacks consistent phase-based structure. This implies that current curational practices are not aligned with their theoretical basis, raising questions about how such practices can evolve to better support emerging psychedelic treatments.
Comparable studies
Other observational and cohort studies on psilocybin, most cited first.
| Study | Year | Design | Participants |
|---|---|---|---|
| Psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression: fMRI-measured brain mechanisms. Patients with treatment-resistant depression | 2017 | Observational cohort | n = 19 |
| Psychedelic effects of psilocybin correlate with serotonin 2A receptor occupancy and plasma psilocin levels Healthy volunteers | 2019 | Observational cohort | n = 8 |
| Increased spontaneous MEG signal diversity for psychoactive doses of ketamine, LSD and psilocybin Humans | 2017 | Observational study | |
| Classic psychedelic use is associated with reduced psychological distress and suicidality in the United States adult population. USA adult respondents from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (2008-2012) | 2015 | Observational cohort | n = 190,000 |
| Prediction of Psilocybin Response in Healthy Volunteers Healthy volunteers | 2012 | Observational cohort | n = 409 |