The Johns Hopkins Psychedelic Playlist: What It Teaches Us About Singing Bowls, Gongs, and the Architecture of Therapeutic Sound

At Johns Hopkins, participants in psilocybin-assisted therapy studies enter a carefully prepared room, are supported by incredible facilitators and listen to a long and carefully sequenced playlist.

Developed through decades of clinical experience, especially through the work of psychologist and psychedelic researcher Bill Richards, the Johns Hopkins playlist was created to support the full arc of a medium- to high-dose psilocybin session: arrival, onset, ascent, peak, post-peak, and return.

In this article, we are going to learn about how we can use the information from this carefully thought-through musical backing in a research setting, and how this can inform our sound practice.

It's not only beautiful or calming, but sound is powerful because it shapes attention, emotion, nervous system state, memory, imagination, and meaning.

It's the serious potential of therapeutic sound impact.

A sound experience becomes therapeutic when it helps create the conditions for a person to soften, listen, feel, release, reorganize, and return.

The Johns Hopkins playlist is one of the clearest modern examples of sound being used this way.

The Johns Hopkins Story: How The Playlist Came to Be

The Johns Hopkins psilocybin playlist is closely associated with Bill Richards, a central figure in both early and modern psychedelic research. Richards began working with psychedelic therapy in the 1960s, including at Spring Grove Hospital Center, where researchers were exploring the use of substances like LSD and psilocybin in carefully supported clinical settings.

One of the great lessons of that early research was that the substance alone didn't exist in vacuum.

Lessons were learned that you may be familiar with. Things like "Set and setting"

But then also trust, preparation, and the music back-bone had huge impact on the way the experiences were received.

When psilocybin research resumed at Johns Hopkins decades later, Richards helped formalize a musical structure that reflected this accumulated clinical wisdom. The resulting playlist runs nearly eight hours and is designed to follow the natural movement of a psilocybin session.

It includes mostly classical, sacred, choral, instrumental, and contemplative music. There are works by composers such as Bach, Brahms, Barber, Mozart, Górecki, Richard Strauss, and Arvo Pärt, along with other spiritual and world-music selections. More familiar lyrical songs tend to appear later, as the participant begins returning to ordinary awareness.

During the deepest parts of a psychedelic session, lyrics can insert too much meaning, pulling the mind into patterns of rumination and remembering or even just plain insinuating things that aren't "there" for the participant.

Instrumental music, sacred choral music, and unfamiliar vocal music can accomplish something with a bit more subtlety.

These sorts of musical accompaniment can guide, rather than force.

The Playlist Is Built Like a Journey

The sequencing of the playlist is built on the understanding that deep inner experience has phases.

At the beginning, the music is gentle and orienting. The participant is arriving. There may be anticipation, nervousness, hope, fear, or vulnerability. The sound needs to establish safety.

As the psilocybin begins to take effect, the music becomes more substantial, but it still needs to feel dependable.

This is a threshold phase. Ordinary control begins to loosen. The listener may sense that something larger is beginning. At this point, the music should not startle or scatter attention but help them establish trust.

As the experience intensifies, the music becomes more expansive, emotional, and powerful. This is where the playlist may include music that is solemn, sacred, sorrowful, majestic, or dramatic. The purpose is here is to facilitate depth.

At the peak, the music may support awe, grief, surrender, beauty, fear, memory, love, or profound silence. The participant may encounter material that feels larger than ordinary thought. The music helps hold that intensity.

After the peak, the music becomes more spacious and reflective. The person is still altered, but the intensity begins to soften.

Finally, the music becomes more familiar, warm, and human. This helps the participant return to the body, the room, the ordinary world, and the continuity of life.

The arc, then is -Arrival - Trust - Opening - Intensity- Surrender -Resolution - Return

Sound familiar, or useful to what we do with sound?

Music As Part of The Therapy

In psychedelic therapy research, music is sometimes described as the “hidden therapist.”

Music can accomplish so many things: arrousal, deepning inward attention, bring emotion to the surface, dampen intensity and create resolution.

Music shapes the acute experience, and the quality of that experience may influence therapeutic outcome.

Sound practitioners are also working with attention, emotion, body awareness, arousal, safety, memory, imagination, and meaning.

Looking at the study and the musical playlist's composition gives us clues at to how we evolve through states in "journeys" of other kinds.

What is being accomplished, is the question we can ask.

Is the sound creating an arrival? Feelings of attention. Safety? Soften defensiveness and ego-love? Support emotional movement?

Beyond Just Relaxation

I am not going to downplay the profound benefits of relaxation. Sound experiences can be very relaxing!

But deep therapeutic experiences are not always merely relaxing.

We may move through grief, anger, frustration, inspiration, insight, awe.

Therapeutic sound isn't just pleasant ambience.

We can create the conditions for meaningful inner movement.

A mature sound journey may include calm, but also depth. Beauty, mystery, intensity, resolution, silence, safety, discomfort! All of the things!

The Real Principles Behind the Playlist

The Johns Hopkins playlist gives us a set of principles that can be applied far beyond psychedelic therapy.

1. Sound must serve the state of mind

In sound facilitation, we should not choose instruments based only on novelty, beauty, or habit. We can also choose sound based on the quality of sound that we'd like to bring, to "bring about" a potential opening in our clients or ourselves.

What state is present, versus what can we move towards for growth?

What volume, timbre, instrument will help us achieve that?

Our sounds can all have jobs.

2. Sequence makes a difference

A powerful gong crescendo may be overwhelming five minutes into a session, but profound after the room has already settled.

Think about it. Watching a film, a crash at the end of a chase scene can be a spectacular culminations! The same crash happening outside your bedroom at 2am when you're dead asleep is a much different experience.

3. Intensity can have intentional architecture

Gong players, attention! Intensity is not automatically depth. Volume is is not the only way!

A powerful sound passage should have form. It should rise, hold, resolve, and leave space. The listener should feel carried.

“Can this intensity be held inside a meaningful arc that makes sense, takes everything into account?"

4. Beauty makes emotion safer

Singing bowls and gongs can help create safety, and beauty. The warm tones of a bronze bowl softly struck and allowed to resonant for 60 seconds can create feelings of being help -- you are safe.

Gong slowing building can create awe.

5. Return is part of the journeys.

Sound facilitators can treat the final phase of a session with equal care as they've done the rest.

Create a full resolution, it's a part of the experience. Breath, body, the room, the ground, simple sounds, silence, voice.

Translating This to Singing Bowls

Singing bowls are especially powerful for orientation.

A listener follows the sound of a bowl from appearance to disappearance, with the inharmonic overtones unpredictably ascending and decaying, allowing the mind to soften from "pattern seeking."

A single bowl, played beautifully, with enough space around it, can do more than a dozen bowls played without discernment.

A development of functional taste comes with playing, and listening intentionally.

Translating This to Gongs

Gongs can create vastness, awe, interruption, fear, anxiety!

That is why the gong is so powerful and benefits from the restrained player.

Why am I building intensity now? Is the room opening or bracing?

Is this sound creating awe or agitation? Where is the resolution?

A Rigorous Framework for Therapeutic Sound

The Johns Hopkins playlist gives us clues about the arc of possible sound journeys.

1. Arrival

The listener enters the room and begins to feel safe.

The sound is be simple, warm, spacious, and non-threatening. Bowls are often ideal here. The facilitator’s voice should be grounded and minimal.

Purpose: orient the body and establish trust.

2. Settling

Attention begins to leave ordinary thinking.

Use repetition, gentle drones, soft bowls, and predictable pacing. The nervous system begins to downshift.

Purpose: stabilize attention and invite inward listening.

3. Deepening

The sound field becomes richer.

Silence becomes more meaningful. The listener becomes more internally focused. Bowls, drones, and subtle gong textures can begin to widen the field.

Purpose: soften control and deepen receptivity.

4. Expansion

The experience opens.

The gong may enter more fully. Sound becomes more immersive. Space feels larger. The listener may experience awe, imagery, emotion, or timelessness.

Purpose: widen the field of experience.

5. Peak

This is the most intense section, but it must remain coherent and intentional.

The practitioner creates waves, rising and resolving.

Purpose: support emotional, imaginal, or energetic movement.

6. Resolution

The sound begins to simplify.

Bowls return, gong playing made softer.

Purpose: complete the arc and reduce activation.

7. Integration

Silence becomes central.

The listener absorbs the experience as the facilitator rests.

Purpose: allow the nervous system to metabolize what happened.

8. Return

The body comes back.

Use simple sound, gentle voice, breath, hands, feet, room awareness, and time. Gentle words.

Purpose: restore grounded ordinary awareness.

Toward a Higher Standard of Sound Work

The future of therapeutic sound depends on more precise language, of asking better and deeper questions.

What sound, for what purpose, for what duration, why?

The Final Lesson

The Johns Hopkins psychedelic playlist is a neat learning device because it can get us outside what we're doing to think differently.

When people come to a sound bath, they are entering a temporary world created by sound, silence, pacing, presence, and trust.

The practitioner is responsible for that world.

It becomes a model for how sound can guide human beings through inner experience with intelligence, beauty, and care.