Researchers in Toronto, who published findings last year that marijuana enhanced users’ enjoyment and taste of music are now exploring in greater detail how cannabis influences people’s musical perceptions and tastes. Researchers in Toronto have partnered up with a downtown consumption bar to conduct a survey of consumers about songs played in the lounge.
Recruitment for the study has already begun and is expected to continue until early 2025.
In the earlier study, participants were asked to reflect on their feelings and thoughts. The past is not forgotten This new project will allow the team to interview consumers directly about how they listen to music and enjoy it while under the influence.
Chi Yhun Lo, a researcher at Toronto Metropolitan University’s Science of Music, Auditory Research, and Technology Lab, explained that now they have all of the cannabis-consuming individuals, we can start testing directly what happens when they are high and listening to music.
Lo, a SMART Lab alumnus who is currently a research intern, and Lena Darakjian are conducting the research at Club Lit in a nearby consumption club. The lounge, located adjacent to a pot retailer, is affiliated Lit Research. Lit Research has a cannabis research licence from Health Canada.
Over the coming months, “we’re having Club Lit’s clientele—and really anyone who’s interested in enjoying the lounge—come in” and take part in the new study, Darakjian said in an interview with MEDCAN24.
Visitors who wish to participate can use QR codes on the tables in the lounge. This will bring up a questionnaire that asks about the visitors’ engagement and enjoyment with the music, as well as whether they felt any emotion. In an earlier study, the team found that participants “reported changes in cognitive processing. They noted altered attention, absorption and interpretation of lyrics, as well as memory and critical analysis.”
Researchers acknowledged that Club Lit is not a clinical, sterile environment. They said that’s exactly the point.
Lo explained, “Background Music is always going be a common component of most social experiences. Whether it’s a pub, restaurant or cafe,” Lo said. “What we’re really interested in is pairing cannabis with these specific music experiences…so we can better understand what the positive and negative effects are of cannabis.”
“It’s a possible confound to not be able to know what’s going on,” he said, “but if I were to argue the other way, having a sterile, sterile environment would be the ultimate confound because there’s little stimulation, and that’s far from the real life.”
The playlists will be rotated by genre. This allows researchers to test if marijuana affects listeners’ preferences for certain genres of music.
Darakjian explained, “We are trying to find the right balance so that we don’t drive away our clientele because of music they may not associate with cannabis.” “However we have a variety.”
Genres sampled for the new study include pop, rock, R&B, reggae, soul, electronic and jazz.
In the past, the study of the duo revealed that participants showed a greater openness to trying new things. Lo said that while people may have a preconceived notion of their favorite music, they might be more open to new genres of music when high. “That will tell us something very interesting about these processes.”
Club Lit is a lounge that brings together diverse communities to listen to music and to share feedback. Club Lit represents a new frontier of cannabis experiences.
Keep an eye out for more exciting news!
— Lit Research (@lit_research) October 15, 2024
Al Shefsky is the founder of Club Lit, which borders Lit Research. He said that the lounge was designed to provide a comfortable space for indoor consumption. He said that when the SMART Lab researchers contacted him about a realistic setting for their research, “we were immediately interested.”
Shefsky, a MEDCAN24 reporter, said that Shefsky needed a place to provide an authentic experience both for the consumers and the participants. We were really delighted to work with them, and to start this project and get the data, and see where we can now go with this model for a legally operated lounge.
Shefsky says that Club Lit is, to his knowledge, the only indoor cannabis consumption lounge legally operating in Canada. He is excited that the space will serve as a lab to study how marijuana affects music experiences.
He added: “Anyone that has been smoking marijuana for a long period of time knows how much better music sounds when you are high.” “This isn’t, like, earth shattering for that population.” What’s missing are the numbers. “There’s been no research to explain or validate this.”
He’s pleased that Club Lit’s research may improve the lives of people, whether it’s by a greater appreciation of the music or the therapies unlocked from the study’s results.
What exactly is the purpose of studying cannabis’ effect on someone’s musical experience? Lo, from SMART Lab, told MEDCAN24 it’s “not a big focus of what we are interested in right now.” She stressed that the initial focus is to simply develop a better understand of how marijuana effects musical processing and absorbtion.
The findings will eventually shed light upon the brain’s reward system, its broader mental awareness, and its sensory overload.
“I think there are some really interesting things to be learned about psychoactive listening—cannabis-induced listening—and how that might relate to not just normal auditory functioning, but maybe more importantly, more neurodivergent listening,” said Lo, whose work includes research on neurodivergent listening. “I believe there could be an interesting intersection that nobody has ever considered,” said Lo. We are only at the beginning of our journey. We hope there will be some significant therapeutic possibilities that we can leverage.
Musical anhedonia is a condition in which people can’t enjoy music. The study found that marijuana could enhance musical pleasure for people with the condition. It may also be a new way to treat other types of music anhedonia.
Darakjian asked, “What if they decide to listen to some music while smoking cannabis?” “Would this change their level music enjoyment and maybe the anhedonia, in general?”
“The one other thing,” she added, “is just the fact that we really think absorption plays a key piece in this… A lot of that could be related to the fact that you are experiencing differences in time perception, in emotion, in embodiment and so forth.”
Mitacs, a government-funded program, is funding the SMART Lab research. Lo explained that after a Globe and Mail article, some commenters on the internet criticized the study for being a waste.
“The way I would push back on that is that this is a very modestly funded study, and because we know so sufficiently little, I think it’s really important that we do have a grounded understanding of this—particularly when psychoactive use is on the increase,” he said.
“Cannabis is the most commonly used psychoactive substance in the world. People like to sing and play music when they are high,” said the researcher. “This is a very common thing, and we can’t afford to ignore its effects.” We’re doing it with a very small budget.”
In other examples of science digging into generations-old marijuana questions, a recent federally funded study identified exactly what happens in the brain after using marijuana that appears to cause the munchies.
Scientists at Washington State University published their findings in Scientific Reports. They revealed that cannabis activates a cluster of neurons located in the hypothalamus area of the brain which stimulates appetite.
Cannabis’ hunger-inducing effect has been well understood by consumers. But now, new animal studies offer insights that may help develop targeted therapeutics to treat conditions like anorexia and obese people.
As for music, a separate study published a few years ago explored the intersection of music and psilocybin-assisted therapy and undermined conventional wisdom that classical music is somehow more effective in that setting.
The study was published in Pharmacology and Translational Science, a journal of the American Chemical Society. The present data challenges the notion that Western Classical Music, or any other genre of music for that matter, is an inherently superior form of music for psychedelic therapies, at least for everyone at all times.
Johns Hopkins compared classical music sessions to those using overtone music, which includes instruments like gongs, Tibetan bowls and the didgeridoo.
The team concluded that, although there were no significant differences in the musical genres examined here, several trends indicated the overtone-based music playlist produced slightly better results and was more preferred by this small sample.
One of the authors of the study wrote on social media that “apparently classical music isn’t such a sacred calf for psychedelic therapies.”
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