ASMR You Serious?

There’s a good chance that you have never heard about ASMR, and if you have, you almost certainly haven’t talked about it. But almost everyone has experienced it in some way or another, either as a tiny child, in romantic encounter, or maybe even during a game of telephone. When somebody whispers in your ear, it can trigger a very relaxing, somewhat paralyzing chill that spreads in a wave over the head and sometimes in the lower back. This is caused by a relatively unknown mechanism in the body called the autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR). Depending on the context, it can foster a feeling of tranquility and/or sexual arousal. While the scientific reasons for this response are still unknown, the sensation has found a significant appeal among a growing YouTube community.

A simple search of the terms “ASMR” or “whispering” will result in an array of videos that oddly enough comprise of many people just whispering to the camera, most of the time for about twenty to thirty minutes. Sometimes they just make lip sounds. Sometimes they tap and scratch random objects. Sometimes they pretend to give the audience a fake haircut.

So what’s going on here?

It turns out that for many people, ASMR videos provide a drug-free way to relax by tapping into a sensation in the body design for exactly that. In order to fall asleep, people will listen to YouTubers (sometimes known as ASMRtists) whisper and tap objects to create this sensation in their headphones. There are all different kinds of people making these videos but certain voices are more effective to certain people.

And as it happens, certain audio recording techniques are more effective as well. After finding out that ASMR videos exist, I found myself very intrigued not only by the idea of using this sensation to relax, but also how to use 3D audio recording techniques to best recreate natural human hearing. I developed an ASMR series of my own called “Ultimate Plane”. The idea behind it was to create a found footage style narrative using ASMR to tell a post-apocalyptic story. In terms of stereo recording, I used two omnidirectional stick microphones places just outside the frame of the shot, replicating approximately where human ears would pick up sound. When two omnidirectional mics are recorded together and then hard panned left and right, it creates a three dimensional listening environment, meaning that even without visuals, a person would be able to pinpoint the direction and distance of the source of the sound.

Only five episode were shot because I realized I had gotten too many people and too many props involved to keep making the weekly commitment to record episodes, but of the feedback I got, it was mostly positive, albeit many people thought it was weird. To tell the truth, it is weird, but it works and whiles it’s rarely talked about, a lot more people turn to ASMR than you may think. For me, it was a test in storytelling and sound recording and someday I’m going to go back to 3D ASMR sound recording. In the meantime, I think I’ll just listen to it sometimes and pretend that I don’t.

Throwing Sound

The concept of throwing sound is a very interesting one. Placing a sound in a specific place is very difficult due to the eternal movement of sound waves. There is product out now that can throw sounds wherever you want them. Granted the speaker is the size of an old flip phone so theres not much output volume but nonetheless it is very cool.

Basically there is a small parabolic speaker that has a coned shape in order to "shoot" sound wherever you want. The effect is that you can point the speaker at someone and only they can hear it, like a whisper in their ear; when you move it away from the person it sounds like the sound is bouncing off the wall behind them. Difficult to explain in words but very easy if its actually been done to you. I found out about this product from a guest speaker in one of my classes who used chirping crickets to demonstrate the soundlazer to my astonishment. I had never heard such precise placement of sound I almost cried. In the entertainment industry, parabolic speakers are becoming increasingly popular in mixing sound for movies due to the precise location of the sound. Many new speaker systems are incorporating these speakers so engineers can adjust not only the direction of the sound but the HEIGHT of the sound. So say you're watching a movie and spaceship moves from the bottom of the frame to the top, you would hear the sound "underneath" you. Once the spaceship moves to the top half of the screen it would sound like it is "above" you. This was used in Gravity with amazing results and will soon become the new normal for mixing action movies.