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Noticable Differences In Music and Sounds
5-MeO-DiPT & DiPT
Citation:   Napoleon. "Noticable Differences In Music and Sounds: An Experience with 5-MeO-DiPT & DiPT (exp9860)". Erowid.org. Feb 14, 2002. erowid.org/exp/9860

 
DOSE:
15 mg oral 5-MeO-DiPT (capsule)
  60 mg oral DiPT (capsule)
BODY WEIGHT: 145 lb
I am a classically trained music theorist and a psychonaut, so I made it my mission to try out DiPT. I don't usually write/submit trip reports as I consider my use of entheogens to be primarily spiritual and personal, but as a music theorist I feel especially qualified to speak more scientifically about this particular substance.

I had done 5-MeO-DiPT before on a number of occasions, and I have settled at around a 15mg dose for a comfortable trip. For my first (and so far only) DiPT experience, I wanted to be on 5-MeO-DiPT because I would be visiting the Art Gallery of Ontario, in Toronto, and I thought the 5-MeO-DiPT would enhance my sensory experience. Also, I was familiar enough with 5-MeO such that I was sure I would be able to easily identify and differentiate its effects from those of the DiPT.

I settled on a 60mg dose of DiPT because it was a small enough dose that I was unlikely to be overwhelmed, while at the same time it should have been large enough to yield the obvious effects of the drug. The combination of the two drugs, according to available info, should not (and did not) have a synergistic effect.

I should also note that I had been using 5-HTP as an anti-depressant for a couple of weeks prior to this experience, and on this particular day I had already ingested 150mg, spread out over a period of about 3 hours. This probably mildly enhanced the effects of both substances.

After a 24-hour fast (which I always find necessary before psychedelics) I took both drugs in capsule form about 70 minutes prior to arriving at the gallery. During these 70 minutes, I was a passenger in a car and we were commuting to Toronto. As the drugs took hold, I was gripped with uncertainty due to recent events in my life. The stability of my employment was in doubt, for example, and my spiritual path felt very vague, frightening, and uncertain. I had done a bit of Ecstacy twice in the previous two weeks, and my brain still felt a little bit unwired from those experiences. Also, I usually experience a certain uncomfortable feeling at the onset of a trip (especially with 5-MeO-DiPT), and this time was no exception. My anxiety was further heightened by my lack of experience with DiPT.

In the car we were listening to progressive trance and house music. I have been into this type of music for a long time, but on this particular occasion I was having difficulty enjoying it becsuse of my mental state. However, as I entered the trip, the music took on a more enjoyable quality. I began to feel slightly euphoric in the car, and found myself unconsciously moving my body (feet, legs, head) to the beat, which I do not usually do. I began to get pretty excited and all of my surroundings in and beyond the moving car seemed utterly beautiful (I attribute this mostly to the 5-MeO-DiPT).

The DiPT was a bit slower coming on, but the music took on a quality that it never had before -- it started to seem more and more vague. I had a few outright hallucinations in pitch and timbre, which are quite rare for me (I was familiar with the particular music we were listening to, so these hallucinations were not due to any lack of familiarity with the tunes). Being a theorist, I tend to hear music pretty objectively -- it is what it is in a technical sense, the pitches/structures involved, etc. -- 'emotional content' in music is something I view as a learned quality, and it is not with such culturally attuned ears that I listen. But, here, the objective sense was temporarily lost. At this point, the drugs were still coming on and the nature of the DiPT state was still pretty unclear.

Upon arriving at the Art Gallery (I was dropped off, as my friends had other business in the city) I was essentially peaking on both substances.

I had some minimal conversation with my friends in the car before being dropped off, and I noticed the 'lowering in pitch' associated with DiPT that I had read about. It isn't easy to describe. It is probably described best in Shulgin's commentary on a 250mg dose in TiHKAL, but on my dose it wasn't happening to a frightening extent. I noticed this phenomenon primarily with voices, those of others and my own. Ambient noises (like an air conditioner or the car engine) sounded to me much as they usually do. I had no difficulty communicating with or understanding other people. My ears felt slightly 'plugged up', as they might when I am sick. I was reminded of the feeling my ears have had at certain raves I have been to without earplugs; after a couple of hours in the ridiculous loudness all of the sounds start to sound more alike than different, with pitch and structure being the primary differentiation between them as the finer qualities of the sound are lost because of the mental effects of the monotony and the physical effect on the ears.

The only previous time I had visited AGO I was tripping on about 500mcg of LSD. It was a pretty amazing experience. I found on this occasion that I remembered the gallery pretty well, and as I was peaking I found my way to a large Chuck Close painting, which frankly blew my mind because of the visuals from the 5-MeO-DiPT. This was sort of the climactic moment of the trip, as after this I settled into a nice plateau and looked around the rest of the gallery.

The gallery was interesting, but I found most of the art to be too mainstream for my tastes. I came to the conclusion that public art galleries are not really for artists -- they are for people who are interested in the definition of 'good' (legitimate or, god forbid, 'important' or 'historically significant') art as determined by the upper class. In short, pseudo-academics and the status obsessed. I found most of the people around me to be more concerned with socializing and sharing critiques/opinions of the works than with simply looking at them or appreciating them as things that were made by real people (people whom they would likely have treated like shit in person). As a living, breathing artist I can vouch well for the fact that not many of these people appreciate or even care what it means to be an artist in a personal sense, or understand the severity of the difficulty that most artists face in this world.

At any rate, the drugs wore off slowly and left me in a lucid state that I still inhabit a few days later. I feel reassured about my path, and much of my anxiety is abated. As an artist, I realize, I must not be surprised when those in power do not understand me or my work. I must find strength with the spirit of other artists who go through and have gone through similar problems to my own.

As the DiPT wore off, I noticed more the effect that it had on ambient noises, which led to insight as to the nature of the drug. It was a bit windy in the city that day, and, walking on the streets, I noticed an irregular modulation to all of the sounds I was hearing. I found I was able to connect this to the acoustic effects that such things would have on sound, which I had previously only appreciated in theory. I have come to the conclusion that DiPT does not 'lower the pitch' of sounds in and of itself. I have perfect pitch, and the pitches around me were clear to me once I adapted to the DiPT state (after the initial vagueness). They were not 'lower' in frequency by any means. The perception of harmonics (or overtones) of the pitches, however, were somewhat altered.

To clarify, all naturally occuring sounds consist of a number of different disctinct pitches (harmonics) that have a certain relationship to each other -- their relationship in time and frequency (both specific and relative) defines the characteristic of the sound.

I postulate that DiPT somehow makes one more aware of the environmental or acoustic factors that play into how a sound may reach you, and the effects that this has on how the sound 'sounds' in an objective sense to the individual. In other words, sounds will sound less like what you think they are and more like what they actually are -- you can process more information about them.

Rather than perceiving what sounds the listener like an abstract idea (a flute, for example), you hear more objectively what the sound actually IS and what it is actually doing in a scientific sense. Hence, the lower harmonics will sound louder, as these are the sounds that are the strongest and travel the furthest. Higher overtones will be less apparent as these are weaker sound waves that are more susceptible to alteration by environmental factors.

This is where the perception of the modulation and environmental factors is most clear. Thus, things sound 'deeper' or 'lower'. If one listens carefully on DiPT (or sober, if you try hard enough), one can hear the pattern of the wind effecting what you know is a steady sound/pitch at the source (for example, a car horn in the city on a windy day). You can hear the acoustic effects of different rooms or standing in different places in the same room, as the sound will be bouncing at the walls and certain harmonics will reach your ears at different times in different places.

A more apparent example is the way that a siren from a police car or ambulance will change in apparent pitch due to the direction in which the vehicle moves -- if it moves away from you, the pitch/frequency lowers (because the sound waves are getting further apart); if it moves toward you, the pitch raises (because the sound waves are getting closer together).

This may not be terribly clear to anyone unfamiliar with acoustics, but hopefully some of you out there will find it interesting or helpful while tripping on DiPT to think of what you hear in this way. I plan to conduct further research with this chemical to test my hypothesis. I am especially interested in using it at a rave and hearing the differences in sound in different parts of the dance floor, or behind/to the side of the speakers.

Exp Year: 2001ExpID: 9860
Gender: Not Specified 
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Feb 14, 2002Views: 18,283
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DiPT (110), 5-MeO-DiPT (57) : Various (28), Music Discussion (22), Combinations (3)

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