ASMR, a Sound Art: Experiences from Online Classes in Music and Multimedia

Description

Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) is a relatively recent concept in psychology that has come to designate (Allen 2010) a genre of audiovisual production. ASMR movies are digitally native and enabled by online platforms, notably YouTube. Anyone typing 'ASMR' into a search engine today will be faced with a fearless and fascinating mosaic of performance art, advertisement, and pranks. While ASMR as a genre is often considered to have emerged from theatre practices, I argue that it is also, and equally strongly, rooted in sound art. It is however seldom recognised as such, for multiple reasons. Firstly, technological inventions in the past seven centuries have in general driven cultures towards a habitual prioritisation of visual cognition over auditive perception (McLuhan 1962). Secondly, and especially relevant to ASMR, Internet-enabled distribution modes are highly disruptive of previous industry practices in music and sound art (as they also are, though to a lesser degree, in film and games). Partly for these reasons, ASMR is seldom part of academic curricula that have a built-in inertia. This inertia is often beneficial to stability, but can be excessive. For example, higher education in music has for decades severely lagged behind societal and artistic realities. Even sound art, which is rooted in music, sculpture, and visual arts, is such a heterogenous field of art and research, seemingly deliberately porous in defining itself, to the extent that educational curricula in sound art might easily be dominated by established cultural practices and risk perpetuating a 'white+male+Western' bias in knowledge transmission. While education in acoustic music appears hopelessly deaf to novelty, even sound art, when it is taught at universities, risks missing out on important aesthetic experimentation if pedagogues choose to ignore the current surge in creativity thanks to ASMR, generating both an extension to and a renewal of sound art and other fields of art. It is therefore timely to discuss ASMR as a novel and digitally native form of audiovisual expression within a critical context of decolonised knowledge systems.

Takeaway

In the proposed session, I will discuss features, reactions, and responses to ASMR, which I have taught as a module in Sound Art classes since early 2018, both in-situ (classroom) and online (remote). My students have engaged with ASMR as a novel genre of audiovisual expression that is enabled through Internet and related technologies, and worked with it both creatively, i.e. as a style, and critically, i.e. as a means of expression. The students in my classes are majoring in music composition, instrument performance, visual design, media art, and creative technology. For the purposes of a conference in contemporary and digitally enabled (or enhanced, engaged…) pedagogy, I will present ASMR as a tool that connects three aspects of learning that are crucial for these students in their current and future professional activities, namely: 1) to promote a fundamental understanding of art as a cumulative practice that is continuously being extended through technological innovation while seamlessly reflecting the societal context of its authors and audiences; 2) to enable exploration of today's topics, conflicts, aesthetics, and expressions in order to go beyond established curricula and become 'absolutely modern' (Rimbaud 1873); and last but not least, 3) to have tonnes of serious fun. The proposed session will include examples from student works produced in my classes at Seoul National University and City University of Hong Kong.

Abstract

ASMR is short for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response. Experienced by some people, it is a sensation that has been described as relaxing, shivering, and tingling. These attributes are reminiscent of sound-induced chills or 'frisson', a phenomenon investigated by researchers in music emotion psychology. The term also refers to a multifaceted subgenre of movies that may produce such sensations, and to a community of people who produce and consume such movies. The vast majority of ASMR movies are produced for online distribution by mainly young authors for their Internet-native audiences (Gallagher 2016). Many ASMR movies can be understood as a form of 'personalised theatre' that is transgressive, 'non-standard', often erotic, but not sexual. I argue that the strong emotions evoked by ASMR movies stem from the way in which actions are materialised through 'hyper-real' and saturated sonic and visual elements in these movies. The soundtrack typically exhibits an intense focus on foreground sonic events, resulting from the amplification of 'small sounds' and quasi-total elimination of background ambiences, and simultaneously, a careful attention to spatial effects, i.e. stereo panning and reverberation, enabled through recently increased availability of 'pro-sumer' audio recording equipment and software. These technical features promote a high degree of immersivity, if not realism, of the auditive experience, which is further underlined by a visual focus that 'explains' the actions heard in ASMR movies. This paper argues that the 'ASMR effect' is achieved in movies characterised by a loosely scripted performance within a setting of personalised theatre (Allen 2010) that amplifies materialising sound indices (Chion 1994). In this regard, what ASMR resembles most of all, as an artform, is performed sound art.