Music in a psychedelic therapy session should hold the room without steering the patient. That is the idea Rogers Masson arrived at after his own treatment, and it runs against how most clinics do it.
Masson is a US Army veteran who spent 25 years in production studios. He was patient one in the expanded access portion of the MAPS phase three trials of MDMA assisted therapy for PTSD, treated at the Pearl Institute in North Carolina. During his first medicine session, the clinic played the Johns Hopkins playlist, which is widely used in this field. He later counted eight or nine genres and dozens of composers on it: Baroque strings, a Beethoven piano piece, sitar music, African drumming, Native American flute, then meditation tracks of the kind you would hear in a yoga studio. Each piece ran two or three minutes with silence in between.
For a patient who is wide open on MDMA, those shifts landed hard. Every song had a different tempo and instrumentation. The silences frightened him at a primal level, since hearing is a survival sense tuned to catch threats. Vocals pulled him out entirely. He compares it to being deep inside a film while someone taps you on alternating shoulders every three minutes. Other patients told him the same thing. One person who had been assaulted shut down whenever male vocals came on and lost perhaps an hour of a treatment that is expensive and hard to get into.
Why a composer distrusts music in therapy
Masson’s objection is not that the playlist was badly chosen. He respects the people who built it. His objection comes from his own craft. He holds a degree in music and electroacoustics and spent a career writing music designed to change how a listener feels. As he puts it, “the fact is that music is manipulative.” He adds, “I do not believe at all that therapy is a place for manipulation.” A familiar song can pull a patient toward a first kiss or a first look at the ocean. That feels good, but it is an escape from the work the session is for. Even a beloved personal playlist carries the same problem.
When he raised this with his clinicians, Kim Skelton and Dr. Raymond Turpin, they told him they already knew. They just did not know how to fix it. He also learned the playlist had been built for psilocybin, not MDMA.
Sound that changes without announcing it
Masson paused his music career for several months and built an alternative. His model was the old color screen savers that drift from blue to indigo so slowly you cannot say when the change happens. He wanted an audio version: no melody, no harmonic structure, no rhythm, no vocals, always moving but never marking a transition. The goal was for the patient to spend all of their attention on the treatment and the clinician to spend all of theirs on the patient instead of skipping tracks and adjusting volume. Dr. Turpin got it cleared for use with the patients who came after him. That work became his company, Psyonic.
You do not need a clinic to test the principle. The next time you sit down to journal, meditate, or have a hard conversation with yourself, put on a long, steady ambient track with no vocals and no beat. Notice how often your attention gets pulled by the sound versus how often it stays on the work. Then compare that with a normal playlist. The difference is the whole point.
From the episode: MDMA-Assisted Therapy and Immersive Sound with Rogers Masson, with Rogers Masson. Read the full transcript.