Auditory effects - Psychedelics |
This article attempts to break down the auditory effects contained within the psychedelic experience into simple, easy to understand titles, descriptions and levelling systems. This will be done without depending on metaphors, analogy's or personal trip reports. The article starts off with descriptions of the simpler effects and works its way up towards more complex experiences as it progresses.
Enhancements
Auditory enhancements can be described as the feeling of being extremely aware of all of the sounds around you with an enhanced ability to pinpoint the exact direction from which multiple layers of noise are coming from as sound becomes vastly crisper and clearer than anything felt during normal sober living.
The most interesting manifestation of this component is a greatly enhanced appreciation of music, allowing people to hear songs they've listened to their entire life in a level of detail that is simply unparalleled in day to day life. This can be described as every single layer of the music being brought forward and heard with perfect comprehension, to the point where many people feel that you have not fully listened to music until you have heard it under the influence of this effect.
Distortions
Auditory distortions can manifest themselves in many forms but often take the shape of echoes or murmurs rising in the wake of each sound, accompanied by distorted changes of pitch. These increase proportionally with dosage up until the point where music and sounds are consistently followed by a continuous reverb as sounds begin to bounce at great speeds across the walls of your brain continuously, often leaving the original sound as completely unrecognisable but always resetting to base level and starting over if the noise is stopped or changed.
This effect can be broken down into 3 differing levels of intensity:
- Mild - These are subtle and spontaneous reverb, echo effects, and changes in pitch attributed to noises within the external environment. They are fleeting in their manifestation, underwhelming in their intensity, and easy to ignore.
- Distinct - These are extremely obvious and spontaneous, but are occasionally consistent reverb, echo effects, and changes in pitch attributed to noises within the external environment. They can be very long and drawn out in their manifestation and loud enough to make them impossible to ignore.
- All-encompassing - At this point, the audio distortions become constant in their manifestation and impossible to ignore. The alterations become so complex that the original noise is quickly rendered unrecognisable.
Hallucinations
Auditory hallucinations are essentially the heard equivalent of imagery and open-eye transformations. They can be described as spontaneous imaginary noises that are either triggered at complete random or manifested in the place of noises that are subconsciously expected to happen. The most common examples of these are usually experienced as clips of recorded sound, such as imagined music or voices, and an infinite variety of sounds that are stored within the brain.
The most common audio hallucination that people experience are ones of heard memory replays from the previous several hours, commonly manifesting themselves as spontaneous clips of the music that was played and indistinct voices of the people who were spoken too. These are usually heard repeatedly over the course of several hours after the consumption of certain substances.
This effect can be broken down into:
- Partially defined, embedded hallucinations - At this level, the sounds are partially defined in their clarity meaning that they sound indistinct, muffled, and difficult to make out. They are strictly heard only embedded within genuine sounds produced by the external environment. For example, hearing music in the sounds of the wind, cars, and rain.
- Partially defined, separate hallucinations - At this level, the sounds remain only partially defined but become heard on a separate layer of their own instead of only manifesting themselves within other noises.
- Fully defined, separate hallucinations - At this level, the sounds become fully defined in their clarity, meaning that the specific words being spoken or musical content of the hallucination can be recognized and understood perfectly.
- Interactive, fully defined and separate hallucinations - At this level, the sounds remain fully defined in their clarity but become partially to fully interactive, meaning that the voices can be conversed with and the spontaneous noises or musical symphonies controlled.
