The “Eargasm”

One of our reviewing critics told me “I had an Eargasm – and it was delightful”

An ‘Eargasm’? A most singular term. What does it mean?

I traced the etymology of it to “A sense of pleasure derived from listening to something, particularly music” in a quote by M Cordell Thompson in his article called “New York Beat” in Jet Magazine from March 25,1979. A review of a Smokey Robinson show in which Thompson said, “One lady in the audience said that when Robinson sings she just sits in her chair and has multiple eargasms.” Pretty powerful stuff.

It also has a second meaning, it’s about what you can feel when you squeegee your ear with a Q-Tip, although in this case it is about what you hear and not a waxy ear canal.

Music can be created and rendered such that it produces a thrill, a tingling, a ‘rush’ that has all the attributes of a body shaking, mind blowing, and overwhelming physical event.

Time, place, and stimulation came together to expand your soul, titillate your mind, and trigger your nerves to open you to this special event.

Time and place you pick. The stimulation, well, that’s a bag of tricks that audio designers work hard at.

Stimulation is based on data coming to your body, to your senses. Since virtually everything in our head is an illusion and are memories. The job is to get your ear nerve endings to report to your brain that which will trigger a memory. It would appear that the more and-or better the data, the deeper the memory, and thus more profound the feelings you get.

These memories evoke pleasure, and we are on the way to the Eargasm.

This also suggests that the Eargasm is based on art and not science. This is not to say that things of science are not part of all this, but Eargasms are an art, not a science.

We must remember that science is based on the idea that you can set up and do something and each time you do it you get the same results. Listening to music has no such repeatability and it is thus an art.