Medicine

“Music can heal, if life is put into it.”

Those are the words of a holy man named Inayat Khan, plucked from his treatise, The Mysticism of Sound and Music. A renowned musicologist, philosopher and singer, he is largely credited with bringing Sufism, a mystical branch of Islam, to the West during his travels through WWI. 

“Health is a perfect condition of rhythm and tone.” He wrote. “And what is music? Music is rhythm and tone. When the health is out of order it means that the music in ourselves is not right.” As a music student, I would carry his book with me from lesson to lesson, tucked into my gig bag to keep it dry from the Boston rain as I walked the same streets he did a century before on his pilgrimage to bring his message to America. 

Expressing his concern, he shared, “the great drawback today in the world of song is that people are going far away from what is called the natural voice, and this is brought about by commercialism. They have made a hall for one hundred persons, then for five hundred, and then for five thousand persons. A man must shout in order to make five thousand people hear him, in order to have a success.” 

Music is made by how we make each other feel. Greatness requires an attunement to your own and other people’s souls. Harmony or dissonance is in the way you breathe, how you act, and in the words you choose. The instrument is you, and how you live is what keeps it in tune. 

When I stepped into my career in 2010, the inflation rate on his principle shared in 1910 had increased a hundredfold. This was the rise of social media so the emphasis on music-making for attention-getting was being shaped by the emerging necessity of “going viral” to succeed. Going viral. Those words alone should have told us we were making ourselves sick, long before we saw how it made us act.

There’s a place for Inayat Khan’s principles in pop culture now. It’s called ‘Medicine Music’ and while it’s nothing new, the growing level of interest from today’s audiences is. 

It dawned on me that a shift was happening a couple of years ago while I was on a boat in Antarctica with Diplo and the musician Rhye, debating with the scientists on board whether the music from our dance parties was attracting the whales. Strikingly, that very same day on the other side of the planet, a team of scientists shared an announcement of their success in communicating with a whale off the coast of Alaska through the use of an underwater speaker. See, up north, they were using AI to optimize their whale songs. Down south, we were using vibes.

I loved ribbing our scientists on board with the silliness of this idea. We were, after all, aboard a circus at sea that was being widely memed online as “Diplo’s Wellness Cruise” for its featured sound baths, yoga, and meditations. 

It was during one of those sound baths, led by Rhye (aka Mike Milosh), that I experienced one of the most remarkable musical moments of my life. We were in a glass atrium on the upper deck of the ship as it navigated between icebergs through a tight channel in the Antarctic sea, with glacial mountains rising on either side. It was the December solstice near the South Pole, so we were passing quietly through an everlasting twilight. For the first half or so, Rhye was playing acoustic versions of his popular songs. For the second, he was doing something different. He was being someone different. He wasn’t performing as Rhye, he was making music as Mike Milosh. 

Those familiar with Rhye’s music will recognize his voice for its uniquely ethereal quality, often both melancholic and soulful to the point of feeling intimate. Much of this sound comes, I imagine, from Mike’s early classical training on the cello. Liberated from the recitation of his own songs, he began to improvise, simply making music to meet the moment. The prosody of the melodies matched our environment of ocean waves and frozen fog. 

A sound bath is meant to be an attunement. So, listening closely, I attuned to my instinctive feelings. Quietly, I stood up and walked to the windows at the ship’s bow. Two pods of orcas had approached on either side of the ship and were swimming alongside us, escorting us across the sea.

“Besides the natural charm that music has, it has a magical power, a power that can be experienced even now. It seems that the human race has lost a great deal of the ancient science of magic, but if there remains any magic it is music.” – Hazrat Inayat Khan

It’s silly to believe in magic. Yet it’s undeniable to encounter awe. Such is the magic of art. Let science claim the search for truth. Music is the search for beauty, and it’s through beauty the truth is often found. 

The label ‘Medicine Music’ applies first and foremost to an indigenous approach to music making, often as an accompaniment to ceremonial gatherings with or without plant medicine. The Yawanawá tribe of the Amazon have become powerful cultural ambassadors, traveling far and wide to host gatherings in the hundreds singing powerfully, accompanied by the steady strumming of acoustic guitars while serving hapé, a sacred shamanic tobacco snuff medicine. Ayahuasca ceremonies of the Andes, guided by icaros, the songs of the Quechua medicine people, have exploded in popularity around the world. 

Contemporary world music artists like Poranguí have blended together medicine music influences from across the Americas into something of a continental folk instrumental movement that has captured its own sub-sub-culture of spiritual seekers in the music festival world. The last decade or so has seen the emergence of festivals such as Medicine Festival in England, Envision Festival in Costa Rica, Aniwa Gathering in California, and others that harness the growing audience at the intersection of indigeneity, spirituality, sustainability, and music.

In the worlds of ambient and electronic music specifically, musicians like East Forest whose 2019 album Music for Mushrooms: A Soundtrack for the Psychedelic Practitioner and Jon Hopkins 2021 album Music for Psychedelic Therapy have focused squarely on the usage of music for guided ceremonies with plant medicine. In 2023, when André 3000 made a pivot into ambient flute music with his album New Blue Sun, it was heralded as a smart, provocative turn by a tastemaker toward a renewing trend in culture. Collaborating with new age instrumentalist Carlos Niño, the project infused playful references to medicine music themes with tracks such as the lead single, “I Swear, I Really Wanted to Make a ‘Rap’ Album but This Is Literally the Way the Wind Blew Me This Time”.

All of this describes a growing cultural movement but doesn’t decode what I believe to be the most important aspect of what’s going on: a renewed valuing of the experience of music made from the full depth of your human spirit in rising counterpart to the now deafening noise of the artificial. 

There is a paradox in this in that we are seeing a modern expansion of an ancient approach to music that is powered by the intimacy of presence, in a shared moment of human experience, happening at a time of technology’s seizing the means of creative production. Could this emphasis on human creativity — should it — overcome the forces of commercialization?

Vivien Vilela, co-founder of Aniwa, an international platform that shares Indigenous wisdom and amplifies the voices of Indigenous leaders through online education, an annual gathering, and in-person retreats, is a guide for many who seek an authoritative connection to the deeper truths held by human cultures. Born and raised in Brazil, Vivien has dedicated her life to her spiritual studies under the mentorship of some of the most respected Indigenous elders from South, Central, and North America. She has taken a sacred oath and commitment in the Wixarixa tradition to continue to serve her life as a Marakame — a shaman that can heal and teach. 

“Medicine music is more than sound,” she says. “Medicine music opens the heart, calms the mind, and harmonizes the spirit. It often calls upon the forces of nature and spirit to bring forth healing. These songs carry a frequency of beauty, reverence, and balance. Icaros, for example — sung by shamans working with healing plants — are not just songs; they are energetic tools and spiritual channels.

“Each icaro carries the consciousness of the plants and serves as a bridge between the seen and unseen realms. They can be sung to activate the energy of the medicine during ceremony, clear energetic blockages, remove negative influences, guide participants through their inner landscapes, and call in protective spirits, ancestors, or elemental forces to support the healing process.”

She continues: “The way music is performed carries just as much energy as the sound itself. The focus is not on performance, but on presence. Every sound, movement, breath, and silence is part of the medicine being offered.”

There is also a science to this approach to music-making, in the knowledge of specific tones or sonic frequencies held to be sacred. As Vivien articulates, “A hallmark of medicine music is its use of natural, harmonic frequencies. 432 Hz, for example, is often called the ‘frequency of harmony,’ believed to resonate with the body’s cells and the natural rhythm of the Earth. In contrast, much of today’s music is produced using 440 Hz tuning. Many believe it contributes to a more dissonant, mind-centered experience that can disconnect us from our bodies and inner stillness. Medicine music is about tuning in, pop music can be about tuning out.

“Medicine music has the potential to play a much larger role. As more people awaken to the importance of frequency, intention, and spiritual health, this music can become a bridge, reconnecting individuals to nature, ancestral wisdom, and their own inner truth.

“Be mindful of what you’re listening to,” she warns “because sound is not just entertainment — it’s energy. And energy has the power to heal or to harm, to center or to scatter.”

This brought me back to what had intrigued me so much about that musical moment with Mike Milosh and the whales: a musician more answering their inner call than responding to an outer tradition. In that performance, he was straddling between Rhye, who has over 130M streams on his songs, and a call to a more mystical identity that, at that moment, could not have an audience greater than whomever is present in any given room. It was an attunement in frequency from the modern world Inayat Khan warned about and toward the ancient world he remembered. 

I asked Mike how this shift from mainstream toward medicine has continued for him. He clarified that the Medicine Music I’m asking about is “music that has a doorway to the mystic, inherently a long form experience with many peaks and valleys. 

“A lot more patience and a lot more — and I stress that — subtlety is required for medicine-specific music. 

“American culture is a fairly new culture, one that needs to move past the stages of growth that it has been cycling in. The homogenization of wellness culture needs to move past just capitalistic endeavors and into mystical expansion, and a connection with both our planet and its wonderful animals, the universe and consciousness and our ability to commune with other beings. We need to grow and become more self aware. There is no rule, no one way, there are many roads to calm, self realization and actualization.

“I do feel this world isn’t a surface one, and should be approached with a lot of care, a lot of intention and with the right people around. Musically that is incredibly important.”