The soothing, digital rooms of YouTube
Picture this: You’re in the Hogwarts library. Rain falls outside, a fire crackles across the room, and somewhere off screen, quills scribble on parchment. You might look up from time to time to see a book drifting through the air or stepladders moving around on their own. Or maybe, you’ll feel so relaxed, you nod off to sleep.
Welcome to the world of socalled ambience videos, a genre of YouTube video that pairs relaxing soundscapes with animated scenery in order to make viewers feel immersed in specific spaces, like a jazz bar in Paris or a swamp populated with trilling wildlife.
They are part of a long tradition of audiovisual products and programming designed to make a space feel a little more relaxing, a little nicer.
Consider the black-and-white footage of a crackling yule log that the New York television channel WPIX debuted on Christmas Eve in 1966 — grandfather to the many digital yule logs available today — or the rise of white-noise machines that fill a room with the sound of crashing waves, chirping crickets or falling rain.
But recently, this genre of video has attracted new fans who want to be transported beyond the same four walls they’ve been staring at for the better part of a year.
“I’ve gotten comments that emphasize how helpful these videos were to them during the pandemic,” said Melinda Csikós, a 33-year-old ambience creator
from Budapest, Hungary, who operates the YouTube channel Miracle Forest. “I have a subway ambience, where a person said — from New York, I think — that they weren’t able to take the subway in a year and it was nice for them to listen to this ambience because they like taking the subway and they miss it.”
Lindsay Elizabeth, a freelance copywriter from central Florida, fell headlong into the ambience genre last year because she wanted to recapture the experience of working in coffee shops. Elizabeth, 31, misses the random conversations she used to have with strangers and the little moments she’d witness, like an engagement that played out on the other side of the window while she was working at a Starbucks.
Of the ambience genre, she said: “It gives you at least a little piece of what we’re missing.”
“Harry Potter” and chill. The genre is a close cousin of autonomous sensory meridian response videos, or ASMR videos, which are meant to evoke the pleasant brain-tingling sensation that
some people experience when they hear sounds like hair brushing, nail tapping and soft whispers.
But ambience videos are differentiated, their creators say, by their purpose — not necessarily to give the tingles, but to relax and soothe a viewer by means of an immersive experience.
There’s a video for just about every taste and mood. Library and cafe environments tend to be popular, but viewers can also enjoy the more specific experience of a carriage ride through the woods, a haunted Victorian manor, the RR Diner from “Twin Peaks” or a full hour of Olivia Rodrigo’s hit single “Driver’s License” edited to sound like it’s playing in another room during a rainstorm.
“Harry Potter” videos have become a major theme across the ambience genre. Hogwarts settings strike a compelling balance of being cozy and studyfriendly, and they certainly have transportive potential.
“It’s not something you can have in real life. It’s a fantasy, so
I wanted to have that fantasy where people can actually spend time in their favorite novels,” said Claire, an ambience-video creator who runs a popular YouTube channel called ASMR Rooms and has many that are Harry Potter themed. (Claire is identified by her first name only because of previous internet harassment.)
“If you go back to my very first video, I literally slapped a fireplace into a Hogwarts common room, and that was it,” Claire said.
Since she uploaded that video in 2015, her fantasy-themed ambience work has gotten a lot more elaborate. She records audio at home and in the wild as much as possible — capturing the sound of pages flipping, or birdsong and rain while she’s out on hikes — and has been building a library of original sounds so that she doesn’t have to license them from a stock catalog.
“Self-medicating media.” For all the variety in the genre, ambience videos tend to be designed for maximum coziness, with lots of moody lighting, snapping fireplaces and rain hitting the imaginary windowpanes.
For Sam Ali, a 27-year-old who lives in Ottawa, Ontario, ambience videos have been a key tool for managing anxiety levels that have been “through the roof” since March. A book blogger, Ali likes to throw on an ambience video when she’s settling down to read — a cafe with soft jazz playing, maybe, or the Hufflepuff common room.
“I leave all of my thoughts outside my bedroom door, turn on my ASMR Room, get in bed and read, and completely lose myself in a different world,” she said.
Helle Breth Klausen, a doctoral student at Aarhus University in Denmark who researches digital media, including ASMR, classifies ambience videos as a kind of “self-medicating media.” (She also includes in that category Spotify playlists of soothing sounds and meditation apps such as Headspace and Calm.)
“As soon as you have entered this universe, you don’t have to give it any more thought,” Klausen said. “You know what’s going to happen, and it’s predictable in a very safe and soothing way.”
From coping mechanism to career. Csikós, the ambience creator from Budapest, said she started watching ambience videos in 2013, when she was having a “really bad time mentally” and struggling with anxiety.
“I had them on in the background very often, and I used them to meditate as well, to just shut everything down around me and bring myself into a calm space,” she said.
She created her own ambience channel in late 2013, hoping she could give others the same peace of mind she found.
A fan of Guillermo del Toro and Tim Burton, Csikós aims to create spaces that are “a little better than reality,” where magic and monsters exist in daily life. Her aesthetic leans toward the spooky: In December, she released a “Halloween Christmas” video.
“Even if they’re less popular — because I feel like they’re a little weird, so I feel like less people watch them or find them even — I’d like the fewer people who do find them to recognize that, yes, this is my video,” she said.
When Simon & Schuster dropped Sen. Josh Hawley’s book a day after the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, the news caused an explosion of attention, condemnation and praise.
Amid the cries of censorship and cancel culture, however, the way the publisher backed out of the deal got relatively little attention. Simon & Schuster invoked part of its contract typically referred to as a morals clause, which allows a publisher to drop a book if the author does something that is likely to seriously damage sales.
Widely detested by agents and authors, these clauses have become commonplace in mainstream publishing over the last few years. The clauses are rarely used to sever a relationship, but at a time when an online posting can wreak havoc on a writer’s reputation, most major publishing houses have come to insist upon them.
“They’re just something you have to deal with now,” said Gail Ross, a media lawyer and the president of the Ross Yoon Agency, whose clients include Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, former Attorney General Eric Holder and CNN contributor
Van Jones, among dozens of other political figures and journalists. “Because you’re not going to be able to sign a contract without them in some form.”
Morals clauses do not require authors to be upstanding citizens. Used in contracts across many industries, such clauses are designed to protect companies’ financial interests if somebody they’ve invested in — be it a chief executive or a football star being paid to wear a logo — does something that harms their reputation. But since the point of these clauses is to protect a company from damaging behavior it doesn’t yet know about, morals clauses are, by their nature, vague.
“They’re squishy,” Ross said. “An agent’s job or a lawyer’s job is to make them as objective as possible.”
The clauses vary from publisher to publisher, and even from one literary agency to the next — every agency strikes its own deal with each publishing house — but the general principle is that they take aim at conduct that would invite widespread public condemnation or significantly diminish sales among the book’s intended audience, and that the publisher didn’t know about when it signed the deal. If an author has a propensity for getting in fistfights, for example, the book cannot be dropped because he or she gets in another one.
Publishing executives insist that in an era when social media can unravel a reputation overnight, their ability to market a book can evaporate just as quickly. Many agents and authors, on the other hand, see the clauses as dangerously subjective, allowing publishers to dump a project based on their own assessment of a writer’s conduct.
“It diametrically changes the premise between a publisher and an author, which traditionally always meant that the author’s words in the book were what was promised to the publisher, not the behavior beyond it,” said literary agent Janis Donnaud. “The fact that the publisher can be judge, jury, executioner and, in fact, beneficiary of these clauses seems incredibly outlandish.”
Regnery, the conservative publisher that signed Hawley,
R-Mo., after Simon & Schuster dropped his book, also has a morals clause — what Thomas Spence, its president and publisher, described as the “infamous 5F of our contract.” Regnery will not take it out.
“This is the one thing in our contract that I have virtually no discretion over,” he said. “I’ve been told it’s got to be in there.” The morals clause in Hawley’s new contract was not a contentious issue, Spence added.
A representative for Hawley did not respond to requests for comment.