“As I play the bowl I can feel the instant changes in my body: energetically, physically, and emotionally. My mind is at ease and my body starts to relax,” he says.

He learned from other international sound alchemists and turned his hobby into a wellness company. Lee now leads corporate and individual classes, and has played in Hong Kong, London, New York, and Vietnam.

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Sound healing has gained a large following as a wellness trend since the start of the decade.

Now it is being explored to facilitate new therapies for a post-pandemic population dealing with mental health issues.

Music is also being paired with psychedelic substances in therapeutic settings. Many places have legalised the production and use of psychedelic substances for research, including Canada, Australia and some states in the United States.

Krishna Oswalt, also known by his stage name East Forest, mixed music and psychedelics to cope with depression and anxiety.

Over many years, this transformed into a therapy that he now shares with audiences around the world.

“It took me many years to find my voice in the music space, because psychedelics weren’t treated as therapies for so long,” Oswalt says.

Listening sessions are usually held in a peaceful environment with attendees sitting comfortably or lying down with dim lighting and minimal distractions.

“Although it has great potential and power, the psychedelic space is a whole separate aspect to what I do. I am more interested in bringing the musical component into the wellness space and encouraging other artists to get into that same space in a thoughtful way,” Oswalt says.

“We use music now as our own personal therapies, we curate and score our lives by using songs to create our mood,” Oswalt says. “[Music] is fundamental to being human and in a lot of ways we are just getting back to our humanness and bringing music to a more conscious forefront for what it can do.”

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Dr Frank Russo, professor of psychology and a researcher of auditory cognitive neuroscience at Toronto Metropolitan University in Ontario, Canada, has long believed that sound and music can act as medicine and mitigate negative emotions.

In a 2018 study he conducted, 163 clinically diagnosed anxiety patients showed positive responses to sound-based treatments.

“What we are really trying to understand is how we respond to music and sound on an emotional level and how it affects our mood or cognitions,” Russo says. “Some of the work that I have done over the years is trying to characterise the emotion in certain types of music.”

Russo points to the difference between happy music and calm music. Much Western music is said to be “happy” but doesn’t always create a happy feeling, he says, and a calm feeling could be far more beneficial.

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In 2021 Neonmind Biosciences, a company that specialises in research into the therapeutic uses of psychedelic mushrooms, hired Russo to assist in developing “effective protocols” for psychedelic treatment that include music as an integral part of the therapy.

“Increasingly, people working in psychedelics on the commercial front and research front are very aware of set and setting – this is the notion that contextual variables can really influence the response or experience that someone gets from a [psychedelic] trip,” Russo says.

His real purpose in the partnership was to limit negative experiences and maximise the therapeutic value of music. The partnership has ended and the results of the study are still being explored. However, the experiment influenced Russo to take up a position at another music-centric company, Lucid Therapeutics.

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“If you are feeling stressed and anxious, the idea is you should start with music that is somewhat close to that mood state to match the current mood and take you to your target mood,” Russo says.

By using AI-curated playlists and auditory beat stimulation – combinations of tones, played in one or both ears, designed to trigger changes to brain activity – delivered through personal devices, Lucid’s technology has shown that anxiety can be reduced through listening to the right music.

“We know that music can influence mood – it has been used since prehistory, and we see it in film and advertising being used for strategic purposes,” Russo says.

“Why aren’t we using it for more good when we constantly turn to it in times of need? Let’s harness that power.”