Icaros are the songs sung by shamanic healers, known in the mestizo Amazonian tradition as vegetalistas or curanderos, during ayahuasca ceremonies, understood within these traditions not as musical accompaniment to the ceremony but as a form of medicine in their own right, actively used to call in helping spirits, guide the direction and intensity of participants' visionary experience, and perform healing work during the ceremony itself.
A practitioner typically holds and performs a distinct repertoire of icaros learned over years of apprenticeship and dietary discipline, with specific songs understood to be associated with particular plant spirits, healing purposes or stages of a ceremony, and a single ceremony may move through many different icaros as the healer responds to what is unfolding among participants rather than following a fixed, unchanging setlist. Icaros are typically sung softly, often in a distinctive whistled or hummed register alongside sung lyrics, sometimes in Spanish, Quechua or other regional languages, and sometimes in vocables without ordinary semantic meaning, a feature practitioners describe as allowing the song to carry its intended spiritual effect independent of any literal verbal content a listener might parse.