The Power of Music in Psychedelic Healing
Wednesday, May 27th from
7:00 – 8:30pm PST
Presented live online via Crowdcast
Presented by: Chacruna and The Graduate Student Association for Psychedelic Studies.
Community Partner: San Francisco Psychedelic Society
Scholarships Available for this Event. APPLY HERE.
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Join Matt “River” Baldwin MFT as he discusses his experience with musical playlists for psychedelic work. He will share his insights into the theory and practice of how to create playlists for successful therapeutic experiences with psychedelic medicines. This talk will briefly cover the history of the use of music and psychedelics in a medical context and will then focus more deeply on structural considerations in the process of creating playlists for psychedelic work. It will also address different approaches and types of music for different medicines, playlists of varying lengths and fixed versus flexible approaches to managing the musical experience. He will elaborate on his idea of the thoughtful musical intake and will also discuss aesthetic and technical audio considerations. This talk draws on Rivers’ decades of experience as a musician, psychotherapist and haunter of record stores.
Matt “River” Baldwin, MFT, is a musician and psychotherapist living in San Francisco. He is a 2017 alumnus of the California Institute of Integral Studies’ Psychedelic Assisted Psychotherapies and Research Program. He has produced 9 albums of music under his own name, collaborated with a variety of artists, and has toured widely as a performer. He specializes in the use of music in psychedelic psychotherapy, having designed playlists for a MAPS Phase 3 MDMA trial and a variety of other applications. River holds a bachelor’s degree in rhetoric from The University of California at Berkeley and a master’s degree in counseling psychology from John F. Kennedy University. He is the Director of the Psychedelic Music Therapy Forum for the Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines. Most recently he has been collaborating with Nico Georis on plant-generated music.
