Scientists Explore How Marijuana Affects Enjoyment Of Music Through New Study At Cannabis Lounge

After publishing findings last year that marijuana enhances users’ enjoyment of music, researchers in Toronto are setting out to explore in more detail exactly how cannabis affects people’s musical perception and tastes. They’ve partnered with a downtown consumption lounge to survey consumers in a real-world setting about specific songs selected to play in the space.

Already underway, recruitment for the study is expected to last into the early months of 2025, and the team hopes to ultimately involve 1,000 participants.

Whereas the researchers’ earlier study involved asking participants to reflect on their past experiences being high and listening to music, the new project gives the team an opportunity to ask consumers about their enjoyment and absorption of music while directly under the influence of marijuana.

“Now we actually have all of these individuals who are consuming cannabis, and we can actually start directly testing what’s happening in this exact moment when they are high with their music engagement,” explained Chi Yhun Lo, a research associate at Toronto Metropolitan University’s Science of Music, Auditory Research, and Technology (SMART) Lab.

Lo and Lena Darakjian, a SMART Lab alumnus and current research intern, are working with nearby consumption lounge Club Lit to conduct the research. The lounge, which sits adjacent to a marijuana retailer, is affiliated with Lit Research, which holds a cannabis research license from federal regulator 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 Marijuana Moment.

For visitors who choose to participate, QR codes posted on the lounge’s tables will pull up a questionnaire asking about engagement with and enjoyment of the music and whether the experience prompts any emotional responses. The team’s earlier study found that users “reported changes to cognitive processing, noting altered attentiveness, absorption, interpretation of lyrics, memory, and critical analysis.”

The researchers acknowledged that Club Lit environment is far from a sterile, clinical setting. That’s precisely the point, they said.

“Background music is always going to be a common part of most social experiences, whether that’s a pub or a restaurant or a cafe,” Lo explained. “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 is a possible confound that we don’t entirely know what’s happening,” he added, “but I would argue the opposite way: Having a sterile environment is the ultimate confound, because there’s really such little stimulation happening, and it’s so far removed from the real world.”

Playlists will rotate by genre, allowing researchers to test whether marijuana makes listeners like certain types of music more or less than they typically do, or whether it makes them more open or closed to genres they might not otherwise choose.

“We’re trying to find a balance where we don’t necessarily drive away clientele by playing, you know, music that people may not naturally pair with their cannabis use,” Darakjian said. “However, we do have a range.”

Genres sampled for the new study include pop, rock, R&B, reggae, soul, electronic and jazz.

One of the key findings in the duo’s past study was that participants reported more openness to new experiences. “People have their notion of what they already like, but maybe when you’re high, you’re actually able to engage in new types of music, as well,” Lo said. “That’ll tell us something really interesting about some of these processes that are happening.”

Al Shefsky, the founder of Club Lit and neighboring Lit Research, said the lounge is designed to be a comfortable indoor space to consume. When the SMART Lab researchers got in touch about a real-world setting for their study, “we were interested right from the beginning,” he said.

“He needs a place where it’s an authentic experience for the consumer and for the participants in the study,” Shefsky told Marijuana Moment. “We were delighted, really, to collaborate with them and to kick this off and start getting the data and, you know, see where we can go now with this model that’s evolved for a legally operated consumption lounge.”

To his knowledge, Shefsky said, Club Lit is the only legally operating indoor cannabis consumption lounge in Canada. He’s excited about the space serving as lab to learn more about how marijuana affects people’s musical experiences.

“Anyone who’s been smoking cannabis for a long time knows that musical sounds better when you’re high,” he said. “This is not, like, earth-shattering to that population. But what’s missing is the data. There’s never been research done to actually explain or validate it.”

He’s also pleased by the prospect that the research at Club Lit may help improve people’s lives, whether that’s through a greater appreciation of music or as a result of therapies unlocked through the study’s findings.

So what exactly is the use of studying how cannabis affects someone’s experience of music? Lo at SMART Lab told Marijuana Moment that’s “not a huge focus of what we’re interested in at the moment,” emphasizing that initially, the focus is simply to develop a better understanding of how marijuana affects musical processing and absorption.

Eventually, however, findings could shed light on the brain’s reward systems, broader mental absorption and awareness as well as sensory processing 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 think there could be a really fascinating intersection that no one has even considered yet. We are really just at the start of the journey, and we hope that there will be some really significant therapeutic opportunities that we can leverage.”

One relevant condition that might be implicated in the study’s findings is musical anhedonia, in which people lose their ability to enjoy music. Not only might marijuana potentially enhance musical pleasure in people with the condition, but it could also lead to new ways of treating other types of anhedonia.

“Let’s say they do decide to indulge in some cannabis and listen to music,” Darakjian said. “Would that sort of change their level of music enjoyment and possibly 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.”

The SMART Lab researchers’ work is being supported through a grant from Mitacs, a program funded in part by the federal government. After a writeup in the Globe and Mail, Lo said, some online commenters criticized the study as a waste of taxpayer money.

“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, as a psychoactive substance, is the number-one used substance around the world, and musical activities are the number-one thing that people like to do when they’re high,” the researcher added. “This is such a common occurrence, and for us to be so ignorant of its effects, we have to address that. And we’re doing that with a very modest 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.

Researchers at Washington State University (WSU) published the findings in the journal Scientific Reports, revealing how cannabis activates a specific cluster of neurons in the hypothalamus region of the brain that stimulates appetite.

The hunger-inducing effects of marijuana have been well-understood by consumers, but now the results of the new animal research offer insights that could help lead to the development of targeted therapeutics for people with conditions such as anorexia and obesity.

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.

“Western classical music has long been assumed to be the standard in psychedelic therapy,” researchers wrote in the study, published in the American Chemical Society (ACS) journal Pharmacology and Translational Science. “The present data challenge this notion that Western classical music, or for that matter any specific genre of music, is an intrinsically superior form of music to support psychedelic therapy, at least for all people at all times.”

Analyzing a 10-person trial involving the use of psilocybin therapy to help people quit smoking tobacco, the Johns Hopkins team compared sessions featuring classical music with those involving overtone-based music, featuring instruments such as gongs, Tibetan singing bowls or the didgeridoo, among others.

“Although we found no significant differences between the two musical genres studied here,” the team wrote, “several trends suggested that the overtone-based playlist resulted in somewhat better outcomes and was preferred by a larger portion of this small sample of participants.”

As one of the study’s author wrote on social media: “Apparently classical music is not such a sacred cow for psychedelic therapy.”

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