Month: February 2023

The psychological and human brain effects of music in combination with psychedelic drugs Mendel Kaelen 2017

“Music may be a human invention, but if so, it resembles the ability to make and control fire: it is something we invented that transforms human life. Indeed, it is more remarkable than fire making in some ways, because not only is it a product of our brain’s mental capacities, it also has the power to change the brain. It is thus emblematic of our species’ unique ability to change the nature of ourselves.”

Aniruddh D. Patel

This paper covers the interaction in the mind between music and psychedelic drugs. The paper is very science based as it was published to Imperial College London and includes a lot of tests that were done on patients that were given placebos and LSD and were tested with and without music.

Start of Essay –

Title – The effects of Psychedelia with Sound.

Psychedelics have a profound effect on culture and the psyche. They have been prevalent within mainstream culture since the first synthesis of LSD by Albert Hoffman in 1938.

As psychedelic drugs are illegal and inaccessible in most countries this has made it impossible for scientists to do research on them as they cannot publish their papers.

The

Ecology – The word ecology makes me think of the enviroment and the ology on the end makes me presume that ecology is studying the environment.

Actual definition – the study of the relationships between living organisms.

I have been looking into the role sound plays within the psychedelic experience and the science behind the heightened awareness of sound and audio hallucinations.

I have chosen the text (Explosions in the Mind: Composing Psychedelic Sounds and Visualisations by Jonathan Weinel 2021.)

The text describes the psychedelic experience and how we can recreate sounds that emulate the psychedelic experience and phenomena such as synaesthesia. The introduction to this text briefly guides the reader through the description of the psychedelic experience. Weinel then explains his interest in the topic and how we cannot capture the video and audio of the psychedelic synaesthesia experience with modern day cameras and microphones. This made me think about the future of sound recording technologies, how in the future we may be able to record sound from inside the mind and capture the subconscious.The ethics behind this are debatable as you don’t have full control of your subconscious. A lot of psychedelic music tries very hard to recreate the sounds and feelings within the psychedelic experience this can be seen in the 60s psychedelic rock movement with artists such as Pink Floyd and The Jimi Hendrix Experience having a clear interest in replicating the experience with their live shows and studio recordings. Nowadays we have music such as binaural beats that do a good job of replicating the sound within the experience and live electronic music events that have psychedelic ritual qualities.

“There is no ‘video capture device’ for the mind’s eye”