Original title: Music for psilocybin therapy and the temporal arc of psychedelic experience
Juan Sebastián Gómez-Cañón, Carly Leininger, Danielle Mayall, Robert F. Dougherty +1 · October 2026
In psilocybin therapy, patients take a psychedelic drug and listen to a curated playlist. The goal is to match the music to the drug's timeline, which has an onset, a peak, and a return phase. Researchers used computers to analyze the sound properties of eight therapy playlists totaling 369 tracks. They found that the songs do not systematically change to reflect those three distinct stages. In practice, the playlists rely on personal intuition rather than measurable acoustic patterns.
Imagine hiring a chef to serve a dinner that moves from light appetizers to a heavy main course, ending with a delicate dessert. If the kitchen sends out rich steaks and light salads in random order throughout the evening, the planned progression falls apart. In this paper, curators selected songs meant to follow the rising, peak, and fading stages of a treatment session. Just like that disordered dinner, the sound properties of the chosen tracks turned out to have no consistent progression.
In psilocybin therapy, patients listen to music across a four-to-six-hour session to help guide their experience. Therapists intend the soundtrack to track the drug's physical arc, but this study shows curatorial choices do not actually match that pattern. Without clear acoustic rules, playlists risk failing to support the therapy as intended.
The study only evaluated 45.1 hours of audio across eight playlists and 369 tracks, so it cannot account for other unexamined playlists. Furthermore, it only analyzes acoustic and affective audio features; it does not measure real-world clinical outcomes or direct patient responses to the music.
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Music for psilocybin therapy and the temporal arc of psychedelic experience — Juan Sebastián Gómez-Cañón, Carly Leininger, Danielle Mayall et al. — Scientific Reports — doi:10.1038/s41598-026-73400-2
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.