What is a UNIFIED SONIC ENVIRONMENT (U.S.E.)?

As Ketamine therapy continues to grow in popularity in the wake of a psychedelic renaissance, discovering the connection between music, emotion, and an individual’s psyche (under the guidance of a skilled therapist) is the source of an ever-expanding exploration.
Music has proven to be a necessary tool in Ketamine therapy, with the majority of therapists choosing to utilize playlists to aid in their patients’ sessions. The question arises, however, if playlists are indeed the optimal vehicle for facilitating Ketamine journeys; due to the natural interruptions and deviations from song to song, I believe the playlist structure is not an ideal framework to permit a free-flow of emotion nor to create a cohesive experience from beginning to end. When we look more closely, it seems apparent that using a playlist may actually be exacerbating a sense of discontinuity and disorientation–the already ephemeral nature of the intrapsychic material being elicited becomes further fragmented as the mood, tonal, and rhythmic changes (intentionally conjured by the artist creating each track) could in fact be seen in the light of working against the effort to integrate the aspects of one’s psyche as a whole.
As an innovative alternative, imagine an environment where an individual can transcend their current reality and move forward into an uninterrupted flow of deep exploration; an open-ended sonic landscape that serves as a projection screen for one’s own organic cognitive, emotional, and somatic mental inclinations rather than a specific direction of mood found in “standard” music tracks. I aim to offer a singular experience which would allow you, the therapist, to better guide your patient through core emotional material without the concern of a particular song duration. Tonal continuity provides a through line between overlapping emotional states, increasing the potential of your patient’s progress exponentially, while the reemergence and repetition of certain themes assist the patient in anchoring their journey and being immersed in a developmental process.
In my 20+ years of composing and producing music professionally, my predilection has always been to write toward a visceral reaction, navigating the dialectics of the human experience and teetering between themes of chaos and cohesion, ecstasy and despair, expansiveness and restriction… but ultimately, and most importantly an emphasis on surrender to all that presents itself. In essence, these are not ‘songs’ as one would generally conceptualize musical compositions, but rather sonic landscapes ripe with the potential for the unconscious to become manifest and be witnessed.
It is my belief that the power of this medicine along with the concept of a Unified Sonic Environment (U.S.E) as an alternative specifically to aid in Ketamine therapy will facilitate a transformative experience with a much greater potential for progress within a single session than the current playlist paradigm provides. My hope is to encourage this treatment with a musical contribution as earnestly as I can to the best of my abilities; to constantly evolve, writing compositions with the spectrum of the human experience in mind. We are at the very beginning of a powerful movement in the field of psychology, and I am grateful to be at the ground floor with you.
RICHARD PENZONE IS A COMPOSER, PRODUCER,
AND VISUAL ARTIST FROM LONG ISLAND, NEW YORK.