Most playlists are built by algorithm. Ours are built by experience — and then put through a level of scientific scrutiny that most commercial music never sees.
Here’s exactly how a Listening to Spravato playlist goes from a first idea to a finished, clinically-informed collection ready for your treatment session.
It Starts With Justin’s Own Sessions
Every playlist begins the same way: with Justin Page sitting in a treatment chair.
As a Spravato patient himself, Justin has the rare ability to evaluate music not as a producer or curator, but as someone actively moving through an esketamine session. The first draft of every playlist is built from tracks that resonated during his own treatments — music that felt grounding during onset, expansive at peak, and gently integrating as the session wound down.
This isn’t a theoretical exercise. It’s firsthand, embodied research. Justin notes how specific tracks affect his sense of safety, his relationship to time, and whether the music feels like it’s working with the medicine or pulling against it.
Only tracks that pass this first filter move forward.
Testing With and Without Spravato
Once a draft playlist exists, it’s evaluated in two distinct states: sober and under treatment.
Music that sounds beautiful in an ordinary listening context can feel jarring, overstimulating, or emotionally intrusive during an esketamine session. The altered state amplifies everything — tempo, timbre, harmonic tension, lyrical content. A track with a sudden dynamic shift that’s barely noticeable on a commute can feel like a disruption during peak dissociation.
By testing the same playlist in both states, Justin identifies which tracks hold up under the medicine and which ones need to be replaced. This dual-state evaluation is one of the most important — and most overlooked — steps in building therapeutic music for psychedelic-assisted treatment.
fMRI Volunteer Studies: Watching the Brain Respond
After personal testing, promising playlists move into a more formal evaluation phase involving 15 to 20 fMRI study volunteers.
These sessions allow the team to observe neural and soundscape interactions in real time. Rather than relying solely on subjective reports (“this felt calming”), fMRI data reveals what’s actually happening in the brain as specific tracks play — which regions activate, how the default mode network responds, and whether the acoustic environment is supporting or disrupting the therapeutic process.
Volunteers listen to playlist segments while researchers monitor neural activity, looking for patterns that correlate with reduced anxiety, increased interoceptive awareness, and the kind of open, receptive state that makes Spravato treatment most effective.
Tracks that produce inconsistent or counterproductive neural responses are removed. Tracks that reliably support the desired therapeutic state are kept and refined.
Waveform Monitoring: The Geometry of Calm
One of the most technically distinctive elements of the Listening to Spravato protocol is oscilloscope-based waveform monitoring.
Every track in consideration is analyzed on an oscilloscope to examine the geometric stability of its audio waveforms. This isn’t just about frequency response or EQ — it’s about the shape of the sound over time.
The hypothesis, borne out through testing, is that geometrically stable, smooth waveforms map directly to physical anxiety reduction. Erratic, jagged, or highly compressed waveforms — even when they sound pleasant — can subtly activate the nervous system’s threat-detection pathways. Stable waveforms, by contrast, appear to signal safety to the body at a pre-cognitive level.
This is why you won’t find heavily compressed pop production, aggressive transients, or dense low-end in any Listening to Spravato playlist. The waveform geometry has to earn its place.
Phase-Aligned Architecture
The final layer of the protocol is structural: every playlist is built around the three distinct phases of an esketamine session.
Onset phase — the first 20 to 30 minutes as the medicine begins to take effect. Music here needs to be grounding and predictable, with slow harmonic movement and minimal rhythmic complexity. The goal is to ease the nervous system into the altered state rather than accelerating it.
Peak phase — the deepest part of the session, where dissociation is most pronounced. Music here can be more expansive and immersive, but must avoid sudden dynamic shifts, lyrical content, or anything that could anchor the listener to ordinary reality. Acoustic frequencies are chosen to support open, exploratory awareness.
Integration phase — as the medicine begins to lift, the music gradually reintroduces gentle rhythmic structure and warmer harmonic content. This phase supports the transition back to ordinary consciousness and helps consolidate the therapeutic experience.
Every track in every playlist is assigned to a phase. The sequencing is deliberate. Nothing is random.
The Result: Music That Works With the Medicine
The Listening to Spravato Testing & Validation Protocol exists because we believe therapeutic music deserves the same rigor as any other clinical tool.
Most music used in ketamine and esketamine clinics today was chosen by intuition — a nurse’s favorite ambient album, a Spotify playlist someone found online. That’s not good enough for a treatment this powerful.
Our playlists are the result of personal lived experience, dual-state testing, fMRI volunteer data, oscilloscope waveform analysis, and phase-aligned sequencing. They’re free on Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube Music — because access to clinically-informed therapeutic music shouldn’t require a premium.
If you’re preparing for a Spravato session, or if you’re a clinician looking for music you can trust, these playlists were built for you.