Book part:

Touching Sounds – ASMR-Videos als akustisch teletaktile Medien

Social networks and media sharing platforms have only recently seen the emergence of a rapidly growing online community whose members feel united by their ability to experience a certain type of – primarily tactile – sensation. Termed Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, or ASMR for short, it is described as a pleasant tingling of the skin, frequently accompanied by a feeling of deep relaxation. Those susceptible to the sensation find that it may be triggered by certain sensory stimuli, especially acoustic and visual ones. Accordingly, ASMR videos have been proliferating, in which (and by which) amateur video makers are trying to induce ASMR in their viewers by deploying certain technical-aesthetic and narrative means. For most ASMR experiencers, sound plays a pivotal role and is thus subject to careful selection, production and design processes on the part of the video makers that have already started to display certain standardizations. In this essay, I suggest ASMR videos as a potential object of media studies and examine the ways in which sound is functionalized in ASMR videos, taking into account their role as teletactile media artefacts which constitute a privileged site for exploring acoustic creation of space as well as different possibilities of immersive experience.