The calming art of ASMR videos
If the coronavirus outbreak is stressing you out, said Randall Colburn in AVClub.com, the YouTube video that Taylor Darling posted on March 9 “might bring you a little comfort. Or more terror. It’s hard to say with this stuff.” The 22-year-old is a popular ASMRtist, meaning she belongs to a growing group of video creators whose work is intended to trigger a soothing, scalp-tingling sensation referred to as autonomous sensory meridian response. Whispering is often involved, and in this 30-minute video, the Florida native, also known as ASMR Darling, plays a masked health-care professional who guides the viewer through a medical exam in which “the mask’s rustle, the rip of Velcro, and the repeated washing of hands” are as central as Darling’s calm, very quiet demeanor. Other ASMR videos focus more exclusively on soothing sounds, like crinkling paper, food or gum being chewed, or fingernails tapping. Some of Darling’s own previous videos have drawn far more clicks, said Alexandra Schwartz in NewYorker.com. But her Covid-19 video epitomizes how the women of ASMR—and most of the genre’s creators are women— see themselves as caregivers. “As totally nuts as that seems, they’re not altogether wrong.” Their odd art form “seems made for our frightening, contactless moment.”
The world of ASMR can be “a baffling, kooky place,” said Oliver Wainwright in TheGuardian.com. It’s a realm that celebrates the sound of a turtle eating watermelon. It has made stars of such characters as HairCut Harry, who posts videos of his barbershop visits, and Makenna Kelly of Colorado, who was only 14 when she made a video of herself eating juice-filled tapioca balls and popping them in her mouth. That clip has drawn 5 million views. Given how many of the popular presenters are attractive young women, and the intimacy of the viewer-performer relationship, “ASMR has attracted an inevitably seedy side,” and China has chosen to ban the entire genre, labeling it “vulgar and pornographic.” But one British study found that 82 percent of the ASMR audience use the videos to fall asleep, and some popular young female performers report that their primary audience is young and female. The sensation viewers seek was given its name only a decade ago, by a non-scientist. Yet “interest from the scientific community is building,” and early smallscale studies indicate that watching ASMR videos lowers heart rates. Meanwhile, the first major art exhibition about ASMR is being prepared to open at Sweden’s national museum of architecture and design, just as the coronavirus shutdown nudges internet audience numbers back to roughly their
2019 high. It may be a disturbing sign of the times that touch-starved people are resorting to remotely triggered physical sensations.
But for those who want to try, “a future of tingles awaits.”