#8 — Music, Medicine and Sacred Psychoacoustics with Jonathan Weiss

"What was driving my addiction was to numb, to anesthetize myself to the reality that the world was this shallow, meaningless place with just a bunch of sock puppet theater going on for spiritual endeavors."

This conversation makes the case for sound quality as an overlooked variable in the future of psychedelic medicine. Ryan Rich is joined by Jonathan Weiss, founder of high-end audio companies Oswalds Mill Audio and Fleetwood Sound, for a conversation spanning psychoacoustics, addiction recovery, sound production within Indigenous ceremonies, and the neurobiological reasons why contemporary music streaming, such as Spotify, can feel so profoundly inadequate (especially) in a spiritual setting.

"One could argue that the music is really the medicine, but our mindsets are so screwed up that it requires us to take psychedelics for the sound and music to really get through to us."

Opening this discussion, Jonathan shares how participation in the NYU phase two FDA clinical trials for psilocybin-assisted treatment of alcohol use disorder not only ended a long battle with alcoholism but lit up his current pathway, an ongoing exploration into how sound and music function within the psychedelic experience. He explains why headphones create a neurologically unnatural listening environment, what happens to the brain when it is forced to reconstruct the 96% of musical information compressed out of an MP3, and how we’re designed to “hear” music through our whole bodies, not just our ears.

Following Jonathan’s highly technical breakdown of where the spirit and energy of the original sound are bled out of commercial sound reproduction, Ryan draws on his learning within the Bwiti tradition to introduce the role of live music as active medicine in Iboga ceremony, which leads to a wider discussion of how Indigenous cultures across the world have always understood what Western therapeutic frameworks are only beginning to acknowledge: that sound is inseparable from the psychedelic experience itself. 

Jonathan and Ryan then explore the commercialization of audio and its consequences for how we listen, the neurological superpower of human hearing, the Tibetan Buddhist understanding of sound as the last sense to leave the body, and the differences between hearing and true listening. The episode closes with Jonathan's reflection on the nature of sound itself as energy vibrating at the human scale, and music as the structuring of that energy into a direct portal to the experience of universal interconnection.

At the Iboga Leadership Summit, Jonathan Weiss will be in conversation and collaboration with the musicians creating the energetic field for the summit’s conversations. Together, they’ll be exploring what might make it possible to carry the sonic integrity of a traditional ceremony into a Western therapeutic or clinical context. More from Jonathan in the meantime in his bite-sized YouTube series On Listening.

The Iboga Leadership Summit is hosted by Moughenda and the Bwiti community in Gabon, for physicians, pharmacists and providers, neuroscience researchers, farmers and agricultural technicians, students and community leaders, lawyers, policymakers, and environmentalists, and everybody called to Bwiti, Ibogaine and Iboga.

22-28 June, Libreville, Gabon
Details and tickets: www.ibogaleadershipsummit.com