Artgasm, Music orgasm

Yeah this is very familiar. I'd like to think I know a few things about it too, that might be of use in understanding it.

So music.... the core element to it other than rhythm is interval (meaning the distance between the root note of the key or chord and the playing note). These intervals all have different mathematical relationships with the root note. Some of them are very close in their alignment (like a perfect fifth), and feel smooth. Some of them are very distant, like a minor second, and create a harsh buzzing sound with a horrible feeling of tension. So that is step one... that music has notes in it that have varying degrees of tension.

Step two is that we use these same intervals in our speech to one another to express our emotions! We convey the amount of tension or urgency we have by saying words against musical notes in sequence. I think most people would be astonished to learn this. So as humans, we are really keyed in to musical intervals and the emotions they express, because we use them to understand the other people around us. Part of our construction is that these intervals will induce in us the emotions of the other person. It is a way we have for making others feel the way we feel to better communicate. Women tend to be better at this than men, but I think the sorts that come around here may have an easier time at it too.

Step three is recognizing that music is piggybacking on this system we have for empathizing with emotions in the speech of others. It takes something that was meant to be experienced at a 3-4, and it pushes it to 11, by building structures upon structures, hypnotic repititions, rapid-fire intervals. If you are really listening carefully and taking it all in, it can quickly overwhelm you.

For whatever reason, I seem to be a particularly empathetic person, and I tend to listen to music with a meditative level of focus and receptivity. When I listen to a passionate lyricist from the 70's or something, I experience the sung lyrics so fully I begin to identify with the singer and feel their emotions directly in real time, like I have a direct connection to their life experiences... their sufferings and joys. For me I feel it so fervently and impactfully, it generally causes me to flush with tears. The tears are caused by an incredible excess of feeling.

Doesn't surprise me. The statement that the brain is the biggest sex organ in the human body applies here. The depth and intensity of my MMO's is totally dependent on my mental state, relaxation and state of erotic arousal. I have found that my most "spiritual" sessions occur when I romance myself. This includes candle light, soft music and luxurious surroundings such as an elegantly made up bed. Having my partner intone soft erotic urging is also a trigger. I envy you I would love to have had the experience you describe .... it sounded very powerful.

I don't think ever experienced anything sexual with art. I've felt everything from wonder, to a sense of belonging and "this is where I'm meant to be", to regret & lament, to feelings of grief & loss. Music and art and natural beauty (e.g. landscapes and sunsets) are too much of a temporal thing for me to consider them any other way than cerebrally. Maybe there's a connection I just haven't made yet.

I don't think ever experienced anything sexual with art. I've felt everything from wonder, to a sense of belonging and "this is where I'm meant to be", to regret & lament, to feelings of grief & loss. Music and art and natural beauty (e.g. landscapes and sunsets) are too much of a temporal thing for me to consider them any other way than cerebrally. Maybe there's a connection I just haven't made yet.

To me, it is specifically music. Music is so much more powerful than most other forms of art to me, and requires so much less from me to produce a result, because by its very nature it is meant to induce feeling and emotional resonance.

I think there is also a graying of boundaries here. For instance, I think many aneros users have found that it brings a kind of sexuality that connects to emotional response, full-body reaction, and causes us to have experiences where feelings we don't normally think of as sexual get recruited into a very sensual experience.

The types of reactions I get from powerful music might not be called sexaul in other contexts, but seeing as how it blurs together, and the same systems are used, and that same intensity is there......

Step two is that we use these same intervals in our speech to one another to express our emotions! We convey the amount of tension or urgency we have by saying words against musical notes in sequence. I think most people would be astonished to learn this. So as humans, we are really keyed in to musical intervals and the emotions they express, because we use them to understand the other people around us. Part of our construction is that these intervals will induce in us the emotions of the other person. It is a way we have for making others feel the way we feel to better communicate. Women tend to be better at this than men, but I think the sorts that come around here may have an easier time at it too.

This is very interesting, do you have any reading material about this?

Though it has not much to do with what you are saying, this reminds me of an interesting point my friend brought up once. French classical music tends to have very flat melodies, with small intervalic movement (think Fauré, Ravel, Debussy, and contemporaries). German classical music has leaps all over the place (think german Lieder from the same time period). The difference can be accounted for by the differences in the languages. French is spoken in a small tessitura and with very few jumps in a phrase, whereas german is spoken with a larger tessitura and in a much more bubbly and roller-coaster like fashion...

Step three is recognizing that music is piggybacking on this system we have for empathizing with emotions in the speech of others. It takes something that was meant to be experienced at a 3-4, and it pushes it to 11, by building structures upon structures, hypnotic repititions, rapid-fire intervals. If you are really listening carefully and taking it all in, it can quickly overwhelm you.

I like this idea, because in general I am fascinated by the ways humans short-circuit evolutionary systems for pleasure. For example, everything we are doing to our prostates, and most sex in general, has nothing to do with reproduction.

I would add that any art, music included, is also based on our own prior cultivation. I am sure that the more we partake in an art form (passively or actively), the more capable we are of delving into it's depths and procuring emotional pleasure from it. I am unsure if knowing more about theory helps or not. As a musician, I can listen to a piece of music and analyze it in many ways (harmony, phrase, movement, dynamic, element of surprise, counterpoint, orchestration, timbre, etc.). This doesn't hinder my enjoyment of a piece. It actually gives me more to latch onto than most people. BUT, a music enthusiast with no knowledge of theory, can surely get as much enjoyment out of music as I do. Sometimes I go to concerts with someone "uncultivated" and they have the time of their life, while I am bummed because the singer was flat and it bothers me, or because the drummer's style was off.

I also have had many moments in my life listening to music where emotions (and sometimes even tears) welled up, but this was the first time I could actually guide those emotions along with the music in such a synchronized way as to build it into full orgasmic pleasure! And for me too it is specific to music, due to it's linearity. Though I cry all the time reading and watching films, and get very emotionally involved.

@Thistledown Do you also get shivers from music? I discovered a long time ago that music and many other things give me shivers. Now I have discovered that singing can carry me into very blissful states, starting with shivers and building into a general warm and fuzzy feeling all over. There have been a few times on stage recently where I felt close to orgasmic feelings while singing. But then, in the moment of singing and with eyes and ears on me, that energy goes elsewhere. I talked to a singer friend about these singing shivers, and I was met with a blank stare! And my aneros sessions as well as partner sex are driven by moans, which are not far from singing, which get me incredibly aroused.

Here is a prostate orgasm in a piece of music. Listen with good speakers or headphones, and don't put the volume too loud, because the end is really loud.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8yOP9EUIY8

It starts off quietly, one by one the voices enter, just like the first tingling sensations at the beginning of a session. The phrases are long and intertwining, like muscles contracting and relaxing, and emotions waxing and waning. It builds and subsides only to build higher and higher in intensity. Finally the music explodes in orgasm at the end with trumpets and timpani. The orgasm is wonderful, but so is the entire journey to get there, and one doesn't make sense without the other. The build up is necessary for the release.

https://www.futurity.org/human-speech-is-music-to-our-ears/

Here is an article from 2009.

“Our appreciation of music is a happy byproduct of the biological advantages of speech and our need to understand its emotional content,” Purves says.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2009/03/14/why-music-sounds-right-the-hidden-tones-in-our-own-speech/

Here is one article about intervals which allow us to identify certain vowel sounds.

There are also places we use intervals for functional reasons, like indicating a question. Most people seem to ask a question by producing a 4th or 5th in English and many European languages. I'd guess most of the non-tonal ones even.

That is interesting about German and French classical music... I wasn't aware of that distinction!

I generally tend to enjoy music post about 1890 more... I am a big fan of Debussy. I like the lack of easy resolutions, the strange chord choices, the surprise in the lack of predictability, and his fluidity at transitioning to wholy new musical moments that seem distant from one another. I like a lot more dissonance than earlier music tends to have too.

Not as dissonant in particular, but this composition is one of my favorites:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDnPV8D7BSA

Do you also get shivers from music?

Here are two tracks from two very different women with the same name:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qukojXEK2GI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIp_lD7FzL8

The thing that tends to give me shivers in particular is really clean and focused arrangements. Just a single singer and their one instrument... usually string. One Harp, Dulcimer, autoharp, guitar, and a single singer... something about that pure barebones situation really grabs me. I think with today's focus on "big sound" we don't have the sense for how powerful such a direct and simple case is, as long as you have something that can handle harmonies.You really get lost in the texture and dynamics of individual notes, and how they linger in the air.

I am not sure why... maybe it feels like a personal conversation? I am grabbed immediately, and forced into meditative focus... it is that captivating.

I play Harp myself (and piano), so maybe I am particularly attuned to it. Playing Harp is also something special in a way you might not predict... the soundboard resonates your whole body.

And yes, the build up is very much necessary for the leadup! Part of the power of music is in the power of its contrasts. A power that traditional music has that is lost with newer stuff is its dynamic range. All the way from barely audible to roaring.

Here is a classic 70's track that has a much better handle on the power of dynamic contrast, something they seemed to still get:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVx8L7a3MuE

I am a music lover and I do remember as teen falling into deep states of bliss but I really had no knowledge tools to identify what was happening. Fast forward 40 years. I am an aneroser and meditator and I still love music but now I know that all these things are related on a pretty deep level. Music can be orgasmic or blissful....I guess it is what ever your intent is.

@Thistledown Very interesting articles, thank you! I have trouble understanding exactly what ratio is being referred to to create the intervals that fall into the our division of the octave. But I am slow sometimes to understand scientific talk, and I will read them again later.

I have heard those two tracks (Joni and Joanna)! I rarely listen to "pop music" after 1940, but as a musician, I get a lot of opportunities to be right next to very talented singers and musicians in parties, backstage, or just hanging out. Those moments, where the instruments and voices are so close that I can feel the sound in my body naturally and not through the means of amplification, are the moments I am transported the highest listening to music.

It is a shame that we have lost a lot of dynamic range in music for the sake of compression and mastering that is aimed at creating a music listenable on all sorts of speakers and volumes, as background music and as listening music. This mastering, as well as the tendency to record music track by track, has created a platitude that makes much music sound to me like karaoke, that is, just someone singing over an instrumental track, instead of the vocals and instruments following each other.

I know this isn't a music forum BUT I will say, to the defense of pre-impressionist styles, that one of the aspects of well composed music, the aspect that transcends all styles, is unpredictability. It is just presented differently at different epochs, but it is what keeps us on our toes as a piece of music evolves. Beethoven was the king of it, using simple harmony, but creating instability through massive dynamic changes and completely unpredictable rhythms, as well as new forms. Many composers create unpredictable environments by their never-ending phrases (Bach, Wagner to name a couple). Yet others through startling use of motifs (most composers, but again, Bach, Beethoven, Wagner, Schonberg, Berg). And lastly, unpredictability is through contrasting timbres, textures and orchestrations.

Since I wrote the initial post I am thinking more and more that Bach is the perfect composer of audible orgasms. Here is another chef-d'oeuvre by him, that has that continually mounting density through the additional of voices (it is a 6 voice fugue), never ending phrases (I think one lasts a couple minutes) the mounting of tension through ever more complex harmonies, and a constant sensation of rising and falling:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wm2k6YBlJrA

The constant sensation of rising and falling is for me comparable to the contradictory sensations of aneros play. For example there are passages (and this is common in baroque music, as well as in other classical musics) where the instruments are moving in contrary motion, or where everyone is descending but the bass is rising, or the opposite. This can be heard in the above recording almost constantly. There are so many sensations key to aneros prostate play that are based on contrary movement. On a clear physical level, we relax certain muscles and tense others. On a less clear physical level, there are plenty of moments where the toy seems to be pushed out and sucked in at the same time. It is a physical sensation, but it seems logically impossible. I have read that sensation described on the forum several times (I forget where) so I know I am not the only one who feels it...

More research is (always) necessary, in any case 🙂

@brucemarkland I too have always experienced bliss, and I think you are right, I think we can turn those feelings into whatever we want. I suppose that my aneros use has just made me much (infinitely, it seems) more bodily and spiritually aware, to the point where I can harness my blissful feelings and channel them as I wish.

Very interesting articles, thank you! I have trouble understanding exactly what ratio is being referred to to create the intervals that fall into the our division of the octave. But I am slow sometimes to understand scientific talk, and I will read them again later.

You may know this already (guessing you do), since this sort of knowledge directly applies to the mechanics of tuning several instruments, like the violin. An octave is taking the root note, and doubling it. The Fifth within that octave is the frequency 3/2 the root (so if arbirtary A1 is 400hz, then A2 is 800hz, and E1, the perfect fifth is 600hz. The major third C#1 is 5/4, or 500hz. The tritone is some horrific ratio (45:32), and sounds just as bad, as those two frequencies together are like a super-complex polyrhythm that doesn't repeat much at all (whereas an octave is more like playing 2 half notes against a whole note in terms of the frequencies); it is funny how pitch and rhtyhm meet in this way, because one is macro and one is micro, yeah?

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Bach sort of is a unicorn... way before the others, with a ton of variety and depth- not to mention the flood of music he wrote- and sort of unmatched for a good long time. I find his music really compelling in a way I don't most of his contemporaries. I really connect to the one you posted, and and get the same strong full-body exhileration there. I hadn't heard it before either, so thanks for that!

Wagner is really something too...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQOfIENN2tk

I really connect with the beginning Prelude for Parsifal. Granted I think he shares a lot of traits with the Impressionists. I connect with some of Chopin as well, so that is a fair bit earlier in the 19th century.
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@Thistledown This pitch/rhythm relation has already been fascinating to me. The micro/macro aspect is one that you can hear on the violin, and it is sometimes nauseating when trying to tune two notes on the same instrument (double stops), as you can here the frequency "beats" along with a world of overtones and undertones. Thirds are really hard on my ear, as the beats are far enough apart to hear them. Tritones and 7ths are less obnoxious because the beats are so frequent that they flatten out. But in the end, while playing, one is usually not focused on this level of sound, as there are other more efficient ways to hear intonation.

Also fascinating is the complete lack of coherence between just temperament and modulation, forcing us to use the less natural but aurally acceptable equal temperament. I guess this is based on the natural harmonic series getting very wonky as you work your way up it. Already the 7th harmonic (which is an octave+7th) is out of tune with regards to equal temperament.

On the string instruments there is a visual guide to these ratios when you start playing with harmonics. As you surely know with the harp. Cut the string in two and you get the octave, cut it in three and you get a fifth+octave, in 4 you get a double octave, and so on and so forth up the harmonic series. Of course brass instruments are based on this harmonic series. But with string instruments there is the joy of seeing how, when cutting the string in 5 for example (and getting the double octave+3rd), every point of division creates the same note if you are playing harmonics, and you can actually see the the wave on bigger string instruments... it is pretty far out.

That slow moving wagnerian sound-- coupled with never ending phrases, stunning dynamic range, and expressive harmony-- definitely makes a lot of sense to me on a sexual level. I need to experiment more listening to music. I listen to so little music for pleasure because when I am not playing/practicing/composing, because I spend too much time... involved in other hedonistic activities 🙂