About

Foundations of Therapeutic Music is a first of its kind nine-month immersive programme for practitioners, facilitators and musicians who want to work with music with greater depth, impact and intention. It brings together perspectives from neuroscience, psychotherapy, spirituality, culture and human development, into a single unified framework.

What You'll Develop

Across nine modules with a highly practical focus, you'll build three core competencies:

Therapeutic Musicality

You’ll develop new ways of perceiving and relating to the many dimensions of music. Crucially, you’ll learn to listen through the ears of others and understand the deeply individual way that music is experienced.

Situational Flexibility

You’ll learn to make confident musical choices in the moment depending on the evolving context, responding with attunement and fluidity.

Integrative Understanding

You’ll learn to hold multiple perspectives on music simultaneously, seeing it as a meeting point of emotion, neuroscience, culture, spirituality, psychology, and more.

Teaching Methodology

We'll move from the origins of music and our relationship to it as human beings, through how music actually works and the many ways we listen, to its therapeutic functions and the highly nuanced craft of creating playlists and shaping therapeutic climates. Learning is multimodal and experiential: live interactive workshops, small working groups, video lectures, guided listening, reflective practices and applied exercises.

The nine month container creates the space for the concepts and frameworks included to not be merely understood, but to be fully embodied and translated into your own unique practice, supported throughout by guidance and feedback from both Mendel and your cohort group.

Who it's For

This course is for anyone who works with music therapeutically, or wants to start: clinical therapists, psychedelic and ketamine assisted therapy practitioners, music therapists, breathwork facilitators, somatic practitioners, coaches and guides, musicians and producers, and students and researchers. It is highly relevant for those working with plant medicines and altered states, where music plays such a powerful role in shaping attention, emotion and meaning. No formal music training is required.

Course Format

The live cohort

Twenty-four fortnightly workshops with Mendel, with curated peer groups capped at 20, and 60+ hours of live and recorded content. Begins 16th September 2026 with sessions friendly to BST, PDT, EDT & AEDT.

On-demand

The complete curriculum, self-paced. Your fee counts toward a future live cohort within 12 months, should you decide to go deeper.

Curriculum Overview

The course unfolds over several interconnected phases, combining theory, experiential practice, guided listening, and applied reflection. Each module builds toward the development of therapeutic musicality, situational flexibility, and multidisciplinary integration.

**1. Origins: Music, Meaning, and the Human Story **
Participants begin by exploring music as a foundational aspect of human consciousness rather than a cultural accessory.

Key questions include:

• What is music, and how is it different from sound?
• How did music emerge in human evolution, culture, and development?
• Why has music played such a central role across societies, rituals, and healing practices?
• What may have been lost in modern relationships with music, and what can be regained?
• This phase introduces music as a transformative technology, a non-verbal language, and a core mediator of intersubjective experience.

**2. The Musical Self **
This module introduces the concept of the musical self: the internalised patterns through which individuals perceive, use, and respond to music.

Key questions include:

• How does the self develop through sound, rhythm, and musical qualities?
• What is innate versus culturally shaped in musical experience?
• How do musical preferences, aversions, and habits reflect deeper psychological structures?
• How do people actively use music to regulate, transform, and express themselves?
• Participants engage in reflective practices to explore their own musical histories and patterns of listening.

**3. Dimensions of Listening **
Here the focus shifts from music as an object to listening as an active, embodied process.

Key questions include:

• How does sound become music in the brain?
• How does music become a lived, multi-sensory experience?
• How does music engage body, emotion, imagery, memory, and thought simultaneously?
• What distinguishes different modes of listening, including deep and immersive forms?

This phase lays the groundwork for understanding how music can become therapeutic.

**4. Dimensions of Therapeutic Music **
Participants explore what gives music its unique psychological and experiential character.

Key questions include:

• What musical qualities shape subjective experience?
• How do intensity, complexity, rhythm, timbre, progression, and structure influence consciousness?
• How do genre, culture, familiarity, and novelty shape musical impact?
• How can music support different therapeutic functions such as soothing, deepening, containing, or resolving?

This module introduces a meta-model for understanding musical effects beyond genres or playlists.

5. Person-Centred Music and Therapeutic Musicality
This phase focuses on working with music in relation to specific individuals and contexts.

Key questions include:

• How can we get to know another person’s musical self?
• What does musical attunement and misattunement feel like
• How do we personalise music without reducing it to preference?
• When is music supportive, and when is silence more appropriate?

Participants practice relational and conversational methods for engaging with music therapeutically.

**6. Therapeutic Functions, Directions, and Roles **
Music is explored as an active agent within therapeutic processes.

Key questions include:

• What therapeutic functions can music serve?
• How do intentions, goals, and therapeutic directions shape musical decisions?
• What roles can music play (e.g. medicine, mirror, relational field)?
• How do cultural, individual, and contextual factors influence these roles?

This phase integrates psychological theory with experiential understanding.

7. Creating Therapeutic Climates
Participants learn how musical experiences are shaped by preparation, context, and relational dynamics.

Key questions include:

• How do we prepare individuals or groups to work with music?
• What makes a therapeutic environment supportive of musical work?
• How do rituals, boundaries, and language influence musical impact?
• What supports meaningful integration after music-centred experiences?

**8. Playlist Design and Applied Practice **
The final phase translates learning into practice and includes one month of playlist design workshops for live cohorts.

Participants:

• Learn principles of curating and structuring therapeutic playlists
• Explore phases, transitions, and pacing
• Practice adapting music before and during sessions (live only)
• Engage in a multi-week playlist design workshop (live only)
• Reflect on real-world applications across therapeutic contexts

9. Synthesis and Integration
The course concludes with a synthesis of key frameworks and competencies, supporting participants to integrate learning into their ongoing professional practice.

Schedule

Group 1: Wednesdays at 10:00 am BST / 19:00 pm AEST.

Group 2: Thursdays at 8:00 pm BST / 12:00pm PDT / 3:00 pm EDT.

Your Teacher

Dr Mendel Kaelen, founder of Wavepaths, is internationally recognised for pioneering research on the therapeutic power of music. In this course, he shares the essence of more than 15 years of research and practice.

He completed his PhD in neuroscience at Imperial College London in 2017, specialising in the role of music in psychedelic therapy. He has co-authored more than 50 academic papers and is widely regarded as a thought leader in this field.

His platform, Wavepaths, has supported over 50,000 clinical sessions. He also has had an active and diverse music practice for several decades, has guided hundreds of group and individual sessions, and curated therapeutic playlists that have reached more than 100,000 listeners worldwide.

Feedback

"The content and the reflections surrounding it have profoundly influenced my relationship with music. I have gained greater awareness and openness to what is happening to me and to what music offers beyond the structures we know for understanding it. I feel much more confident integrating musical resources into my practice as a psychiatrist and trauma therapist." Amelia - Psychiatrist and Trauma Therapist, London

"I struggled with questions around music personalisation for a while, both in my group sessions and with individuals. This course has given me new approaches, and a very new way of thinking about music. Now I am witnessing the musicality inside both myself and my clients better, and am responding more strategically and creatively." Hannah - Group Facilitator, Breathwork Practitioner and DJ, Amsterdam

"Foundations of Therapeutic Music offers a rare and thoughtful interdisciplinary synthesis of neuroscience, music, and lived experience. Mendel's sensibility and knowledge are reflected in his teaching, rigorous yet deeply relational, moving fluidly from science to poetry. It has meaningfully enriched how I think about listening, presence, and the role of music in both clinical and creative contexts." Elodie - Psychoanalyst and Clinical Supervisor, Paris

"Most striking to me has been the way the course explores not just therapeutic music, but the capacity of all music to be therapeutic. I hoped it might influence my approach to composition, but more than that, these ideas have changed how I think about and listen to music. Something I didn't even imagine was possible." Aidan - Composer and Producer