#20 - This Is Your Musical Brain On Marijuana

Have you ever noticed that music just hits differently when your high? In this episode of Instru(mental), we're diving into the surprisingly sparse, but curious body of research that explains how cannabis changes our musical experiences. Along the way, we'll touch on what mix of THC and CBD might enhance musical reward and what this might mean for clinicians working with people who listen to music under altered states of consciousness. Thank you to the sponsor of today's episode, Daniel Goldschmidt from Etude, LLC!

References:

• Darakjian, L., Glassman, H., Lo, C. Y., & Russo, F. A. (2025). Exploring the interaction between cannabis and music. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1551, 140–158. https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.70010
• Duggan, P. J. (2021). The chemistry of cannabis and cannabinoids. Australian Journal of Chemistry, 74(6), 369–387. https://doi.org/10.1071/CH21006 
• Freeman, T. P., Pope, R. A., Wall, M. B., Bisby, J. A., Luijten, M., Hindocha, C., Mokrysz, C., Lawn, W., Moss, A., Bloomfield, M. A. P., Morgan, C. J. A., Nutt, D. J., & Curran, H. V. (2018). Cannabis dampens the effects of music in brain regions sensitive to reward and emotion. International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology, 21(1), 21–32. https://doi.org/10.1093/ijnp/pyx082 
• Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. (2025). Key substance use and mental health indicators in the United States: Results from the 2024 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (Publication No. PEP25-07-007, NSDUH Series H-60). Center for Behavioral Health Statistics and Quality, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. https://www.samhsa.gov/data/sites/default/files/reports/rpt56287/2024-nsduh-annual-national-report.pdf 
• Tart, C. T. (1970). Marijuana intoxication: Common experiences. Nature, 226, 701–704. https://doi.org/10.1038/226701a0 

Resources

• Marijuana Anonymous

Transcript

Introduction

Speaker 0:00

There's an unofficial holiday that's coming up very soon that I had not heard of until I went to college, but hundreds of thousands of people around the world celebrate every year. To some listeners, the holiday that's celebrated on April 20th is obviously 420. But if you're like teenage Brea and have no idea what 420 is, then let's clear that up. 420 is a cultural holiday associated with cannabis, which is also known as marijuana, weed, or pot. There are events that draw tens of thousands of people for 420, including Denver, Colorado's Mile High 420 Festival, London's 420 Hyde Park celebration, and Atlanta, Georgia's Sweetwater 420 Festival. And music is a part of all of these events. In fact, listening to music is one of the most commonly reported activities when using weed, with 69% of people saying they often or always listen to music when using cannabis. As of April 2026, over 40 states in the United States have legalized medical marijuana use, and 24 states in Washington, D.C. have legalized recreational marijuana use for adults at least 21 years old. A 2024 report by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services estimated that 22% of people in the US, ages 12 and older, used marijuana in 2024, which in real numbers would be tens of millions of people. So for today's episode, we're gonna be a little counter-cultural and dive into research that explores how cannabis use changes our music perception. Honestly though, with those cannabis use stats, maybe this topic isn't even all that counter-cultural anymore. That being said, I do want to share a disclaimer. This episode explores the science of cannabis and music perception for educational purposes only. Nothing discussed here should be interpreted as encouraging or condoning any activity involving cannabis that is illegal where you live. Etude provides creative, client-centered services that support identity and connection and partners with organizations using the arts for justice to create real world change. Daniel also speaks publicly on music and health, breaking out of binary thought, and fighting authoritarianism. Learn more at etudellc.com, spelled e-t-u-d-e-l-l-c.com. And with that, let's get started. But when it comes to cannabis in music, there's just not much out there, probably due to cannabis being controversially classified as a Schedule 1 drug. This means that, according to the US government, cannabis has no accepted medical use and has a high potential for abuse. Does this drug scheduling fly in the face of current legalization on the state level? Yes. Does this drug scheduling still make it extremely complicated to pass ethical and regulatory reviews of research proposals? Also, yes. Really briefly, let's talk about what cannabis is and how it impacts human experience. Cannabis is a plant that's been cultivated by humans since ancient times. The chemical compounds in marijuana are referred to as phytocannabinoids, which are plant-derived chemicals that activate cannabinoid receptors in human central nervous systems. And the two most well-known phytocannabinoids are tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, and cannabidiol, known as CBD. THC is associated with a marijuana high, including euphoria, increased appetite, distorted time perception, as well as negative impacts like anxiety, paranoia, and working memory impairment. On the other hand, CBD is a non-intoxicating chemical and does not produce a high. Rather, CBD is associated with lowered anxiety and a bodily sense of relaxation. When someone is doing cannabis, there can be any proportions of THC versus CBD in the product. So for example, if someone buys an edible, it might be really high in THC and have almost no CBD, or it could be a blend of THC and CBD. And many CBD-only infused products like drinks or lotions are sold legally in all 50 states. Looking decades back, there are a handful of studies about marijuana that mention or are about music in the 1970s, including an article by Charles Tart in the journal Nature that described a questionnaire given to college students about their experiences with marijuana. Those participants described auditory changes while high on cannabis, including hearing, quote, subtle changes in sound, that music was purer and more distinct, and that lyrics were more understandable and high. Other participants described the spatial separation and auditory space was more distinct between the instruments playing music and the sound characteristics just sounded more vivid. After the Controlled Substances Act was signed in 1970 though, study into music in marijuana really goes dormant, even to today. This was pretty surprising to me, partly because there's so many studies about other substances like psychedelics and music that have risen in the past 10 years. But when it came to searching for studies about cannabis and music, there were only a handful of papers out there. One study that was published in 2025 may be signaling that the academic study of cannabis and music may be growing again. The first author of the paper was Lena Darakjian and described a mixed method study that surveyed 104 participants about their auditory and musical experiences while high on cannabis. Follow-up interviews were then conducted with a smaller subset of participants. Participants for the online questionnaire were recruited from a participant pool associated with Toronto Metropolitan University, as well as through flyers posted at local dispensaries. The final questionnaire sample included 33 males and 71 females who were between 19 and 58 years of age. The questionnaire took a while to fill out because it gathered information about cannabis use, demographics, the hearing sense questionnaire about auditory experiences when using cannabis, and the absorption in music scale to measure how deeply participants got immersed in music. Participants reported using cannabis anywhere from a few times a year, 10%, to more than once a day, 13% of participants, with the most common frequencies being once a week, greater than once a week, or every day. Each of those categories included about 18% of participants. Using cannabis at home was the most common location to use, 19%, followed by parties at 15%. When it came to THC versus CBD balances, 26% of participants reported using high THC and low CBD products, followed next by 15% of people using products with an equal, moderate mix of THC and CBD. But the central topic of this question was trying to understand how cannabis use impacted hearing and musical experiences. The first set of questions asking about changes to hearing gave some mixed results in this self-report questionnaire. A majority of participants, about 60%, reported that cannabis did in fact influence their hearing experience, while 20% said that cannabis did not influence their hearing, and 22% were not sure. About half of participants said their hearing sensitivity was better when using cannabis, compared to 20% who reported that their hearing sensitivity was worse when they were high. And when asked about auditory perception, about 60% of participants reported that their auditory perception was worse when they were high, and 38% of participants reported they perceived auditory information better when they were high. Despite all these mixed numbers, 69% of participants said they often or always listened to music when high, and 80% of participants said they preferred listening to music when high. And how absorbed people got into music when high was significantly higher compared to sober music listening. The type of music people preferred to listen to was pretty diverse and didn't meaningfully change between the participants when they were listening high or when they were sober. So those event planners are wise to have music as a central part of the 420 festivities mentioned at the beginning of the episode. A subset of questionnaire participants completed a follow-up interview that revealed four themes that help explain how people experience music when high on cannabis. The first theme involved how participants' cognitive processing shifted when high, with people reporting that their attentional focus changed and their critical analysis of lyrics, memories, or the music itself was enhanced. For example, one participant said, quote, I find when I'm stoned, I tend to focus on the meaning behind the lyrics. That's actually a really serious subject I hadn't noticed before. Other participants described that the music helps them recover memories they thought were lost, although one participant described having flashbacks to negative or shameful thoughts. The second theme came from people describing changes to their auditory perception, like having more sensitive hearing, new perspectives on sound, changes in rhythm or timing, or even audio-visual experiences. For example, one participant described, quote, you're listening to instruments and songs from a completely different perspective. I think it's eye-opening musically. While someone else reported, quote, if I close my eyes and listen to music, I can sometimes see like colors and what goes on. I find that it's visually intense for me. The third theme centered on changes to their emotional responses, including more openness to feeling emotions more deeply or being more emotionally sensitive. More specifically, someone described when listening to music while high as, quote, oh, I've cried listening to Adele. Into my pillow, sobbed my eyes out. I'm not breaking up with anybody, but in my head I am. For some reason, when I'm listening, I get very emotional, like super nostalgic, super happy, or bawling my eyes out or anxious. Someone else reported that cannabis, quote, accentuates how they're feeling. They said, I listen to what I want to listen to because of how I'm feeling and to amplify the mood I'm in. The last theme described how participants' physical sensitivity changed while high, with feeling more embodied or noticing the music more in their bodies. One person described, quote, obviously I don't know what the experience was like living in the 70s, but there's something about being high and listening to music that transcends you there and you're actually experiencing it. You also feel more personally connected to the band or the artist when you do that. From all of this quantitative questionnaire data and qualitative interview data, the researchers propose that when people listen to music when they're high on cannabis, that this leads to a higher level of absorption in music via those cognitive, perceptual, emotional, or embodied changes. This higher level of absorption can influence the amount of reward someone experiences from the music. While this study is one of the larger, more recent studies on music in cannabis, there are some limitations. Because it's a survey, participants were asked to recall from memory how they felt while listening to music while high. Each person's self-report could be colored by subjectivity or overconfidence in how music impacted their high experiences. This experiment was led by Tom Freeman, published in 2018, and used fMRI to examine how people's brains changed when listening to music when high versus sober, and also compared different chemical mixes of cannabis. This randomized double-blind study recruited 16 participants who all completed the same music listening task in an fMRI machine three times, spread out over at least three weeks. They had at least a one-week break before they came in for the next experimental session each time. In each of the three conditions, participants inhaled marijuana that was equivalent to a small joint, but the joint had either one THC and no CBD, two, THC and also CBD in about equal proportions, or three, a placebo that smelled like cannabis but did not have either THC nor CBD. So participants came into the lab, they inhaled their joint, but they didn't know what was in it, and then they go into the fMRI machine. When they're in there, participants hear classical music excerpts that are about 20 seconds long, or a scrambled version of the same excerpts. Now, scrambled versions of musical clips are common in music science studies because if you chop up a piece of music into, say, 250 millisecond clips and then randomize them, your participants get to hear all of the pitches, loudness levels, and instruments as the original music clip, but the temporal unfolding of the music over time just isn't there. It's pretty clever. After hearing either a classical music clip or a scrambled clip, participants rated how pleasant each clip was, and all the while their brain was being scanned. After inhaling the cannabis, but right before and right after they did the brain scans, participants also answered some questions and got physiological measures like their heart rate and blood pressure taken. These self-ratings verified that the participants did feel high during the two weeks in which their joint had active THC in it compared to the placebo. Both types of cannabis increased participants' desire to listen to music compared to the placebo, similar to the self-reported high rates of music listening when high from the Darakjian study. Very interestingly, in this fMRI study, participants rated their sound perception as best when they inhaled the cannabis with both THC and CBD. The THC-only strain also enhanced their self-reported sound perception compared to the placebo, but with the CBD added, there was a statistically significant higher rating of sound perception than THC only. The fMRI data helps to contextualize why THC plus CBD cannabis might lead to better sound perception. First, let's start with the more general brain scan data. In all of the scans, no matter what participants inhaled, they rated the music clips as more pleasurable to listen to compared to the scrambled clips, which makes sense. This higher listening pleasure rating was associated with greater brain connection between the bilateral auditory cortices, which is where sound is first processed in the brain's cortex, and the right ventral striatum, which is a part of the brain involved with reward. But this functional connectivity between both auditory cortices and the right ventral striatum was greatest when participants had inhaled the THC with CBD cannabis. When the 16 participants listened to music after inhaling the THC-only strain, the auditory cortices and right ventral striatum had a dampened lower response overall. And the researchers did not find any correlations between these findings, no matter how long participants had used cannabis or how often they used cannabis. In their discussion, the researchers mentioned that this dampened reward system response is also seen in depression, and that the chronic use of cannabis could lead to a similar pattern longer term. So, strengths of the study included it being a controlled experimental design, and it gives us a peek into the brain under different types of cannabis use when listening to music. But there were only 16 participants in the study, and the music clips were classical that the participants didn't choose for themselves. The findings might have been different if the participants had gotten to listen to their preferred music. Here are the takeaways from the research we covered today, and I've included all of the references in the show notes. First, music listening can be a highly pleasurable and multifaceted experience when someone has consumed marijuana. People experience changes in how they think about music, how they hear and feel music, and how their emotions show up when under the influence of cannabis. Part of the pleasure of listening to music can be explained by a stronger connection between where sound is first processed in the cortex, the primary auditory cortices, and parts of the brain's reward system, specifically the right ventral striatum. But this stronger brain connection might be even more enhanced when consuming marijuana that has both THC and CBD in it. If you are a cannabis consumer, you might already have your preferences for which strains or chemical compounds you prefer, but trying a strain of a 50-50 mix of THC and CBD might be worth trying out for music listening if that's not your go-to. As a music therapist, I think the takeaways of this research are interesting to consider. When I did clinical work, I did not regularly ask clients about their drug use when I first met them, although the statistics suggest that some meaningful proportion of my clients had likely experienced some of the high music listening experience described in these papers. I think it would be highly dependent on the setting, facility, and therapeutic relationship, but having a conversation about how a client's relationship to music shifts when they're in an altered state of consciousness, like when high on cannabis, could give a music therapist more insight into how the client feels most immersed in music and can take on a different listening ear, so to speak, to explore their musical identity, which could in turn inspire some alternative ways to engage with music in sessions and when sober. And I do want to acknowledge that while some people can use substances like marijuana in a safe and healthy way, that cannabis use disorder exists. If you're looking for some support in this area, I've included links to resources in the show notes. I think this topic of marijuana and music, or even more broadly, how music shifts when we're in altered states of consciousness, is gonna keep growing. For now, there's still a lot we don't know about music in cannabis, including replication of the findings we covered today, and maybe someday expanding into how cannabis impacts music performances or improvisation when sober versus high. I think there's a lot of potential here, but admittedly it will take some major shifts in laws and societal outlook. If you celebrate 420, then happy holiday, and thank you again to our episode sponsor Daniel Goldschmidt from Etude LLC. We will be back with our next episode soon.