Recorded in 1963 but not released until 1967 on Sun Ra's Saturn label, Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy is one of the more notorious of the artist's early New York releases. It near-completely rejects existing notions of jazz in favor of conducted chaos, offering a template for the unknown. Therapeutic for some, electroshock for others. In its lysergic abstractness, Cosmic Tones prefigures by a few years the outer dimensions of psychedelia (which was inspired by psychosis-replicating chemicals), and foreshadows some of the wilder studio escapades of Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. (Early in their careers—though a decade apart—Zappa and Sun Ra shared a producer: Tom Wilson.)

The album—or at least its title—may have originated when Sun Ra's manager Alton Abraham arranged a performance for patients at a Chicago psychiatric facility. Biographer John Szwed, in his definitive Ra bio Space Is the Place, describes the scene:

"The group of patients assembled for this early experiment in musical therapy included catatonics and severe schizophrenics, but Sunny approached the job like any other, making no concessions in his music. While he was playing, a woman who it was said had not moved or spoken for years got up from the floor, walked directly to his piano, and cried out, ‘Do you call that music?’ Sunny was delighted with her response and told the story for years afterwards as evidence of the healing powers of music."