Music

For the American smoker, listening to music is almost as basic to the marijuana experience as matches and ashtrays; one user speaks of a "hunger for music" whenever she smokes. The phenomenal growth in the recording and stereo components industries and the spectacular boom in FM radio over the past two decades are directly related to the rise in marijuana consumption.
    Smokers continually claim that music sounds "richer" when they are stoned. As was the case with eating, scientific investigation in this area has turned up very little, probably because researchers have been asking the wrong questions.
    While most of the studies involving auditory perception under the influence of marijuana have concentrated on the hearing abilities of smokers, in actual fact smokers do not claim to hear better, but rather that music sounds better, a crucial difference. Marijuana users do not report that the drug enables them to distinguish unusually high or low notes, or to hear very soft sounds; they claim rather, to hear sounds differently, more vividly and more intensely. Some researchers have concluded that the reports of smokers regarding music are too subjective to be taken seriously, but this is too narrow and self-defeating a view; the experience, after all, is subjective, and it may be impossible to measure in scientific ways.
    Clearly, there is a process by which marijuana affects the hearing of its users, but it seems more likely that changes are mental rather than purely auditory. As Andrew Weil explains it, cannabis affects the secondary perception of sensory data, not its primary reception. It would naturally be easier to study the functioning of the human ear than to explore how the brain interprets what the ear receives. But that, very likely, is where the answers lie.
    Weil suggests that incoming sensory information, such as the auditory signals that represent music, normally follow established and familiar pathways as they travel from their source to human consciousness.[3] Weil believes that marijuana may interfere with the normal routing of these sensations, forcing the sensory data to find "novel routes to consciousness and thus be perceived in novel ways." This explanation, he suggests, would help account for many smokers' claims that when they are high, they see things for the first time "as they really are," or why they pay special attention to aspects of auditory or visual sensations that they might otherwise fail to notice.
    I asked marijuana smokers to tell me exactly which music selections they found most enjoyable when they were stoned, but the responses covered the entire range of popular and classical music. These days, in contrast to the 1960S, smokers generally listen to the same music whether or not they are high. The "acid rock" phenomenon of a few years ago, in which certain rock music was designed to appeal deliberately to the stoned listener, seems to have faded, probably because it is no longer necessary.
    Many younger smokers assert that the real value of marijuana in listening to music is that it enables them to understand and more fully respond to the lyrics of the songs they listen to, especially those that otherwise appear difficult or obscure. But by far the most familiar claim made by smokers is that marijuana enhances the ability to hear the distinct lines of several instruments at once, helping the listener to better grasp how the various instruments interact to produce the music:

When I'm high, I can hear all the individual parts of the music playing together to create a harmonious whole. I never heard music this way before I started smoking grass. Sometimes it feels almost as if I become the music, not only hearing it but feeling it and seeing it, absorbing it until it becomes part of me. Each instrument and voice takes on an identity of its own while continuing to be true to the whole. In short, when I'm high, I realize why music is considered one of the arts.

    Similarly, several smokers mentioned that it was under the influence of marijuana that they first understood and appreciated the purpose and the effects of stereo.
    A Radcliffe student who had been having trouble in her music course and was unable to recognize individual selections found marijuana to be very helpful. She had formerly listened mostly to rock, and she gradually realized that it made fewer demands on the listener than the music she was now studying. One night she got stoned and listened to a Bach harpsichord concerto:

I don't have to tell you the beauty of it; I shouldn't have had to get stoned to hear that. But it all made sense; I heard the orchestra imitating the harpsichord, then turning what it was doing upside down into inversions. And I went into Leona's room and she gave me the score with this half-smile on her face. Even though I couldn't hear the music then, I could follow the lines, hearing and seeing three or four parts at a time. And during this time, I was almost crying, thinking: "This is real; I may be on a drug, but this is here all the time!"[4]

    She has since learned to appreciate music without marijuana, an example of integrating stoned consciousness into her straight life. But she hasn't given up smoking, explaining that "it still helps to have my hearing sort of opened up every now and then, so I can hear many parts going on at once."
    The ability to distinguish various musical lines can make the stoned listener more sensitive than usual to the differences between individual instruments, as an Iowa man explains:

I greatly enjoy listening to loud rock music on the stereo when I'm stoned. The rhythm seems more solid and inspiring, and each cymbal, each drum, each guitar and every other instrument and voice seems more distinct, more clear. I really get into the music and feel immersed in the bass, with all the other instruments cutting through and the parts fitting so intricately together.
    I sometimes use headphones for a better stereo effect. The music seems even more realistic, and feels like it's not only around me, but inside my head. The instruments and parts move from the left channel to the right, and vice versa, and seem to be running around inside my head, which makes it more intense. Sometimes I close my eyes and fantasize that I'm back at the concert with all its excitement.

    Several smokers spoke of various mental and visual associations stimulated by listening to music when they were high. For example, hearing a saxophone will make Claire aware of the breath that goes through the instrument She says she can often see the instrument in her mind and can make out the discrete finger movements of the musicians. Other stoned listeners use the occasion to let their minds wander:

As you listen, your mind makes you think. You get a kind of fantasy out of an enlarged imagination, depending on what you're listening to. With Marshall Tucker, you think of ripping across the desert on a bullet-speed horse in search of wild women and hard times. Listen to Loggins and Messina and you will sail on a boat as you lie on your couch, feeling the wind in your hair, and sincerity in your heart. Some people really get into it with acid rock and feel as though they are in front of the crowd playing the music, tossing their hair back and forth and sweating as they rip the damn chords off the guitar. It's reality taken by fantasy, cooked in your mind and poured back out, with the mind putting it all together as it goes along at no set pace.

    In most cases this kind of mental wandering enhances the music, but for at least one listener, this is not the case:

I have listened stoned to some of the most emotionally committed singers in rock and blues—Robert Johnson, Bob Dylan, Muddy Waters, Van Morrison—musicians who constantly surprise me and move me under normal circumstances. Instead of getting an enhanced sense of whatever terrors and delights they are singing about, I just get the giggles. I can't help imagining their faces wrenched into comically distorted grimaces as they sing.

    For the majority of smokers, though, music is made more enjoyable and more expansive by marijuana. A man who used to be a jazz critic pays special attention to the rhythm and the percussion of the music he listens to while stoned:

When I started smoking, I got into music, listening with rapt attention for a long time, especially to jazz. I started to hear music differently, and it's related to my experience of time. Rhythm, after all, is sound occurring in time; it's not just the pitch or the timbre which makes music, but the way the notes are spaced out. When music is really together in time, like a good jazz group playing, or African drummers, where precise perception of time is a fundamental aesthetic ingredient—I really appreciate that when I'm stoned.
    Time is flowing and music is constant movement. You can't ever stop and grasp it, it's always moving... but when time is perfect, when everybody is together, it just floats and then becomes solid. I can't describe it beyond that. It's just a solid thing happening, like a huge rock, or a wall; it's just there.

    His wife, a musician, reports a similar experience:

Since I've been smoking pretty regularly, I think I have become more aware of some subtleties I had been missing before. Things like cross-rhythms and unusual harmonic functions have started to jump out at me. Before, it would have taken several hearings or playings to find them. Now, they seem to find me.

    Younger smokers speak enthusiastically of going stoned to rock concerts or, more often, of getting stoned during the concert:

I went slightly buzzed to a Jethro Tull concert and planned on smoking a whole lot during the show. I ate a bag of peanuts and some pretzels before the music began, and then resumed smoking once they started playing. I lit joint after joint, bowl after bowl, waiting to get blown away, but not even giving myself a chance to feel what I had already smoked. The music was great. I remember watching a fabulous drum solo which was so perfect and exact that my mind just couldn't grasp it. The solo went on and on, hard and powerful; it ran strong and intricate, yet its end was never predictable. Just as I thought it would end, the drummer would roll out again and keep it going. Finally, when he did stop, I was exhausted.

    While younger smokers are attending rock concerts, relatively older users are becoming increasingly interested in other kinds of music, particularly jazz and classical, a trend that is almost certain to continue in the next few years. Jenny, a therapist, recalls a college experience that changed her musical tastes:

I was taking a course in music appreciation, and it was the first time I really listened to classical music. We studied Beethoven's Third Symphony, and took it apart piece by piece, instrument by instrument, and talked about it as a composite structural entity, a blending of many different parts into one complete unit.
    So there I was, one night in my apartment, with two friends who were also taking this course. We got very stoned and started listening to the symphony. I started conducting, and my friends took on the task of playing, imaginarily, various instruments. By this time I knew the piece cold. But I also felt what made those instruments work together, what made the music so great. I was on top, in command of the synthesis of these various component parts, and it was incredible. I was at one with the music. I heard the beauty of how it all blended together, and the genius of the outcome was phenomenal.

    "Every time you hear a piece of music," says Lenny, "you get another memory of it, and you build up a tape of how it sounds—in your mind. Each time you take it in, you're comparing it to a previous time, and it usually is pretty close. Eventually you get used to it; 'oh that,' you say, 'the Eroica.' But when you're stoned, it suddenly comes in differently, at double volume, as it were, and it just doesn't fit against the tape. So you end up hearing the music in a whole new way."