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In a small cannabis lounge in downtown Toronto, I exhale a plume of smoke after taking a hit from a gravity bong. Music fills the room as I relax into a comfy chair. But this isn’t a casual smoke session; I’m here for some self-reflection.
My high today at Club Lit is all in the name of science.
I look down at my phone to answer survey questions about how I’m feeling. “Please rate your level of absorption in the music specifically on a scale from 0 to 6,” it prompts. I choose five as Can’t Stop by the Red Hot Chili Peppers immerses me in its funky riffs and groovy bass line; soon after, Aerosmith’s Dream On has me bobbing my head to its moody verses.
Cannabis and music have long gone hand-in-hand – as anyone who’s ever attended a Willie Nelson or Snoop Dogg concert can attest. Now, in an unusual setting that combines scientific standards with laidback vibes, a new Canadian study is hoping to shed more light on how the drug influences our enjoyment of music. (After all, taking the word of some Deadheads is hardly objective evidence of a bona-fide connection.)
“There is such limited literature on the pairing of music and cannabis,” says Lena Darakjian, a research assistant at Toronto Metropolitan University’s Science of Music, Auditory Research, and Technology (SMART) lab. “We have heard how people get absorbed into music so much so that everything else, like background noise, dissipated, but we wanted to take that a step further.”
Darakjian’s undergraduate thesis on enjoying music while high served as the inspiration for the voluntary, observational study, which is a partnership between the SMART Lab and Cannadigm, owner of Club Lit and its neighbouring dispensary. (A grant from the non-profit Mitacs is providing the funding.) Indoor cannabis smoking is allowed at Club Lit because the Smoke-Free Ontario Act provides exemptions for scientific research and testing facilities. (Cannadigm has also spun out another division called Lit Research, a Health Canada-licensed research facility.)
The study aims to discover whether the level of their high influences how immersed a cannabis user can be in music, and whether the enjoyment of songs already liked increases even further. While it may sound like a frivolous topic to explore, Chi Lo, a senior research assistant at the SMART lab, argues that the findings could do some serious good.
“We know that the impact of cannabis seems to affect certain cognitive aspects, maybe even the openness to the experience,” Lo tells me at Club Lit, as he begins to prepare rolling a joint. “There can be a therapeutic application.”
He explains how a condition called anhedonia – where someone doesn’t derive pleasure from usually joyful experiences such as listening to music – could be targeted with cannabis to enhance a person’s appreciation of various activities. Being high while listening to music may also have wider implications for helping people focus on specific sounds they may have largely ignored otherwise.
Darakjian shares that some participants of her earlier thesis work reported that being under the influence of cannabis can make it easier to listen to each instrument in a song individually, and that it can often lead to making connections between rhythm patterns and harmonies.
“This study can open the door to understand the broad impacts of cannabis on the auditory system,” adds Darakjian, who rarely consumes the drug herself and abstains at today’s session.
She is hoping the total responses reach 1,000; since the study began on Oct. 15, they have received 50 participants. When the survey answers have been analyzed after the study shuts down in late January, she plans to write a paper on her findings and submit it to a major journal.
Until then, the work continues at Club Lit. With its neon lights, slushie machine and bongs available to rent, it doesn’t exactly scream “science.” But the setting is crucial to project, the researchers say.
“It’s important for us to have access to the cannabis lounge because it’s a unique space that lets us carry out this study in an ecologically valid setting, and that is often an element that other studies really fail to account for,” Lo says.
In other words, it’s a chance to see how cannabis consumers experience music “in the wild,” as opposed to a laboratory atmosphere.
On each of the club’s six tables sit QR code-embossed cards. A scan takes users directly to the questionnaire. Playlists are curated by genre (rock, pop, soul, jazz et cetera) and played on specific days, so researchers can know what study participants were listening to.
I’m there for a rock day, and as Cho lights his joint, I pull another hit from the sleek glass bong, which uses gravity to pull smoke through water, cooling it down before it reaches the lungs. Jimi Hendrix’s Little Wing plays and the survey asks how in control I am (very much so) and whether I’m nervous (no), relaxed (yes), enthusiastic (not so much) and inspired (somewhat).
I have always loved listening to music while consuming cannabis, but I’m still skeptical how valuable my replies – even along with hundreds of others – will be. Does it really matter whether I’m mellow while listening to Hendrix? Isn’t the obvious conclusion going to be that cannabis and revelling in music complement each other?
As that question circles my mind, in walks Frank Russo, the director of the SMART lab, along with Jorg Fachner, a professor at the Cambridge Institute for Music Therapy Research in England. Visiting Ontario for a research conference, Fachner immediately sits down at our table and turns on his tablet to talk shop with the researchers.
He jabs a finger at the screen, now displaying his paper that looked at how cannabis users altered their perception of music by hyper-focusing on certain areas of songs. The cannabis-music pairing can help people focus on distinct “sound sources,” he says.
“Imagine standing in front of a stage and seeing and hearing the piano on the right, guitar on the left but drum in the back et cetera. That sound staging is a 3-D auditory space,” Fachner explains. “When listening to recorded music, cannabis effects add more space between the notes, so that each note and timbre of an instrument on which the notes are produced has as a more distinct sound staging.”
As Cho, Darakjian and Russo nod along, it’s clear to me that the SMART lab study has more depth than what appears on the surface.
With Foster the People’s Sit Next to Me filling the room with its catchy chorus, my attention moves past the lyrics to concentrate on the impressive bass line – something I may not have noticed while sober. I begin to prepare a Spotify playlist, so that on my way home I can appreciate and savour my favourite tunes in a new light.
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Does cannabis help us love music more? Canadian researchers are on a quest to find out – The Globe and Mail
