THE THRILL, OR AGONY, OF SIMPLE SOUNDS
I FIND A LOT OF THINGS INTOLERABLE, AND I ALWAYS HAVE. — REBECCA TUCKER THE MEDICAL COMMUNITY IS TORN ON WHETHER ASMR EXISTS, BUT I’M NOT. I’VE SUFFERED FROM IT FOR YEARS.
When it comes to sound, there are three types of people in this world. The first type is, likely, the majority of people: people who like certain sounds, hate other ones, but can cope either way. The second type is the sort of person who hates certain sounds, really hates other ones, and experiences a palpable, physical anger when confronted with them. The third type of person loves the types of sounds that the second type of person hates so much, it puts them to sleep.
More recently, you may have heard about the second type: people with ASMR, or Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, a condition that is rapidly evolving into a sort of online subculture. And I hate it, because I fit into category two: those with misophonia, literally “fear of sound.”
For those with ASMR, specific sounds — mostly soft speaking, whispering and crisp rustling or clicking — are relaxing to the point of euphoria. There’s some dispute over whether ASMR stimulation is erotic in nature since, while only five per cent of participants in a Swansea University study last year claimed they use ASMR videos and other media for sexual stimulation, its positive effects are widely referred to as “head orgasms” and many of the YouTube channels producing ASMR content — including the massively popular Hungry Lips — feature hosts speaking softly, eating mindfully and whispering calmly while wearing revealing lingerie.
But almost every positive sonic trigger listed by members of the ASMR community is a negative one for me. Last week, the Guardian ran an extensive story on the phenomenon, and with it, featured a video compiling some of the sounds to which those who experience ASMR are most strongly attractive. I found it intolerable.
I find a lot of things intolerable, and I always have. In the wintertime, the floors in my childhood home would settle, resulting in a persistent but intermittent click- click- click just outside my bedroom door. On these nights I would stuff my ears with earbuds made of Kleenex and sleep on my side with a pillow over my ear and my upper arm laid flat over the pillow. Physical discomfort, in other words, is a small price to pay to avoid physical, sound-borne rage.
I hate whistling to the extent that I have “trained” (as they say) friends and family members to abstain from doing so in my presence. I re- fused to listen to the popular podcast Mystery Show because all I could hear was the phlegminess in host Starlee Kine’s speaking voice. I can’t have a conversation on public transit if there’s someone on the same train wearing headphones that leak sound. I seldom go to the movies because of popcorn.
Because of this, I am comfortable self- diagnosing my misophonia, despite the fact that the medical community is divided on whether it, or ASMR, even exists.
The two conditions have inspired an increased interest in sound as therapy, or torture, but to date, there is only one published research paper on ASMR, with an- other from the University of Sheffield in England in the works. Meanwhile, there are 30 published scientific articles that mention misophonia catalogued in the National Library of Medicine; 19 of them written in the past two years. ( ASMR is an appealing thing to study says one researcher, “because it’s a bit ‘weird.’”)
The most discussion takes place online, where communities in both camps have formed, bonding over shared experience. Science writer Megan Cartwright captured the feeling of sufferers/benefiters in a piece for Slate last year: “When I first read a description of misophonia,” she wrote, “my reaction was: Other people have this?!”
What these two conditions, at polar opposite ends of the auditory pleasure spectrum, anecdotally sug- gest, is that there’s a psychological nuance to aural stimulation that had been previously relegated to the other four senses.
Think about it: we are aware that visual stimuli can terrify us to the point of inflicting a permanent mental scar, but also that there is perhaps such a thing as love at first sight. Touch can traumatize or kill, but lack of touch — specifically in infants — can stunt growth and development, and even lead to premature death. The olfactory bulb, which we use to both smell and taste, is an unparalleled trigger for memory. But with sound, unless it’s paired with other sensory stimulation, how we are affected by what we hear has broadly come down to whether we hear it or not.
Those who do hear it, in a positive way, exist in a big enough number that they’ve already been targeted by advertising industry: last year, Dove chocolate in Beijing launched an ad that targeted ASMR- experiencers with its focus on pronounced wrapper-crinkling.
Meanwhile, in San Francisco, the wearable technology company Doppler Labs has created a product that, perhaps unintentionally, may be ahead of the curve as far as viewing misophonia or ASMR as conditions with massively lucrative potential.
They’ve developed a set of headphones, called Here, that allow wearers to selectively filter sound: turn up a guitar in the distance, for instance, while completely shutting out a nearby openmouth- chewer. They’re a step beyond noise- cancelling headphones in that they acknowledge the fact that auditory stimulation is not a question of wanting to hear everything or nothing. Here headphones offer “dynamic control over your audio environment” — essentially my wildest dream come true. I’m on the waitlist.