As mentioned earlier, not everyone is susceptible to ASMR videos and individuals’ specific triggers vary widely. In a 2015 video, ASMR-tist HeatherFeather details one hundred and twenty different discrete triggers—from more common one like scratching and tapping and whispering to the sound of latex gloves rubbing together and kinetic sand crunching. For some ASMR consumers, a sound-image conjunction is necessary in order to experience the tingles and deep presence of ASMR, where for others, the sound without an image track is enough to trigger the sensation. ASMR presents a vast field of unpredictable forms of new audio-visual experimentation, many with no particular interest in narrative role play nor representations of the human social world. New such genres include: videos of people eating specific types of foods with mainly their hands and face framed by the camera, girls’ hands’ manipulating slime, and animals making soft noises. This article focuses merely on the most popular ASMR-tist and her role play videos because they exemplify a tight integration between sound, image, and practices of affective labor. Maria’s videos tend to figure the source of the sound in the diegesis, working the objects and their accompanying sounds into the role play, which naturalizes the strangeness of ASMR by framing it within the performance of affective labor.

ASMR’s insistence on the maximum materialization of the image-sound relation create an auratic contact between performer and viewer which encourages what Laura Marks terms “a tactile epistemology” in which “knowledge is gained not on the model of vision but through physical contact.”[43] [open endnotes in new window] In her analysis of video-based intercultural cinema, Marks designates a continuum of representation in which one pole is mimetic (tactility is a part of mimetic representation) and on the other pole is abstract, symbolic representation. Marks’ tactile epistemology proposes that there are whole spheres of sentient engagement with the material world that have been repressed in favor of symbolic representation.[44] While Marks proposes tactile epistemologies as a form of alternative ethics in reading film, I contend that tactile epistemologies can serve an even more radical function: to repair the damage inflicted on the sensorium by constant stress through impressing a feeling of deep embodied presence on the viewer.

Performer TheChew, whose channel is almost exclusively food videos, eats pickles. When wearing headphones, the listener experiences the crunching of the pickles as thunderously loud and sharp. The Chew does not speak for most of the video and maintains a very serious expression. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUU Au_aiaVw&t=267s	Performer Slime Halo manipulates “crunchy slime,” which contains foam in it that gives the substance a more pliant than liquid character. This video, as most slime video, does not include any talking, just the performer’s hands playing with the slime. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z HQkMiwqwxU

ASMR’s ability to effect a reparative sense of subjective presence in the viewer is rooted in the way that the practice uses the recording medium to impress upon the viewer the embodied presence of the performer. Another example from Maria’s “eye gazing” video further elucidates how auratic sound functions in ASMR. Maria runs a rake-like massager through her long hair. We can hear the strands being moved back and forth because her hair itself is mic'd with hypersensitive binaural recording devices. At the very end of the video, Maria remarks, “I hope you enjoyed my crinkly shirt,” a comment which reminds us that all of Maria’s physical movements are designed to elicit sounds that both emphasize her physical presence in space and envelop the viewer. This latter effect is achieved through the viewer wearing headphones. The crinkling of Maria’s shirt exaggerates the sounds of her movements, eliciting a tactile sound. This sonic tactility constitutes the auratic imprint of Maria’s body in space. It is Maria’s human trace imprinted in sound that transmits the deep feeling of presence that ASMR fans often report experiencing. I contend that the sonic trace in ASMR is analogous to Benjamin’s linkage of the breathy aura around the portrait sitter in early daguerrotypes. Benjamin writes,

“These pictures were made in rooms where every client was confronted, in the person of the photographer, with a technician of the latest school: whereas the photographer was confronted, in the person of every client, with a member of a rising class equipped with an aura that had seeped into the very folds of the man’s frock coat or floppy cravat.”[45]

Here, the aura is the invisible, but still palpable trace of the portrait sitter’s bodily presence whose movements are inscribed in the temporal duration of the photograph. For Benjamin, the bourgeoisie that witnessed the first developments of commercial photography were endowed with this aura because they inhabited a transitional period in which industrialization had not yet come to completely dominate daily life. This passage illuminates aura as consciousness’ still-temporal trace, a trace which evidences lived experience on the threshold of technological transformation. If we are to understand aura as a category still useful in diagnosing the relation between experience, the body, and the technical apparatus in postmodernity, ASMR’s sound auratics are not just the imprint of the performer’s body, they are the imprint of a certain lived experience, marked in turn by the postmodernization of labor. Though Benjamin first proposed aura as a visual category, I expand the term to include sound. This expansion reveals the transmedial applicability of the term, but more importantly, it reveals how aura designates the abiding presence of the human body in mediation, which manifests as both visible trace and invisible affective force.

ASMR’s extension and amplification of the recorded sound-image relation is premised on a simple and relatively old technology: binaural recording, which mimics left-ear, right-ear sound reception. Though ASMR recording techniques have become increasingly sophisticated, ASMR relies on basic sound and video editing to achieve its tingling effect. Most ASMR videos request that the viewer wear headphones in order to experience the binaural left-right sound division more acutely. ASMR directly equates the viewer’s ears with the binaural recorder and the viewer’s face with the camera lens. In a later part of the video “eye gazing,” Maria handles a marble incense burner, tapping on it, and blowing smoke from the burner into each side of the recorder to simulate blowing the vapor into the viewer’s ears. She then blows into the lens, saying, “and your face.” Her movements around the frame are meant to simulate her movement around the viewer’s head.

Binaural recording was first developed by AT&T and was displayed as an attraction at the 1933 World’s Fair.[46] When the technology debuted at the Fair, it was exhibited as “Oscar,” a mechanical man with microphones for ears sitting in a glass box. Fair goers sat around the box wearing headphones, listening to what Oscar heard: flies buzzing, crowds in the distance. The audience was astonished to hear themselves surrounded by the noises that Oscar heard.[47] Receivers were placed into Oscar the manikin’s head in the place where his ears would be in order to more closely mimic human sound perception. AT&T would continue to produce more advanced models of these manikins until the receiver was shaped more and more like the human ear. Thus we see in the early origins of binaural technology a strong will to draw out the uncanny relation between body and apparatus, a will to imbricate machine and body. The difference in usage between the original Oscar device and contemporary ASMR headphone usage reflects a significant cultural shift. While early binaural recording was first displayed as mass culture spectacle premised on collective reception characteristic of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the use of headphones in ASMR reveals the private, isolated nature of ASMR consumption.

ASMR reverses the sound-as-supplement-to-image relation often found in narrative cinema. In ASMR, the fuzzy digital image is subordinate to the rich sonic textures of the soundtrack. In fact, the first semiformal ASMR “video” on YouTube was created by YouTube user “WhisperLife” and features a woman with a British accent cooing over a black screen. ASMR videos tend to possess the murky, desaturated cast of the video format, even when shot in high definition. What is highlighted in ASMR visuality is texture and light on surfaces rather than the crispness of the image even when the image itself is of reasonably high quality. This is partially because most objects and people featured in ASMR are shot in extreme close-up. Every aspect of ASMR shooting and framing is designed to increase the sense of intimate contact with the performer. While early ASMR videos used cell phone cameras to record and iMovie to edit their videos, as of the last two years, ASMR has gotten much more equipment driven and technologically savvy, and as this tendency has grown, audio recording companies have started catering to the ASMR market.[48] Maria has gone so far as to construct a sound-proof booth to minimizes outside noise. Additionally, some practitioners have even made instructional tutorials narrating how to use Audacity to create clean, yet “three-dimensional” sound.[49] The emphasis on­­ three-dimensional sound and static zoomed-in framing combine to impress upon the viewer an exaggerated sensual intimacy with the performer’s face.

ASMR erotics are two-fold: constituted by the vaguely sexualized and often cartoonishly feminine self-presentation of the performers, as well as by video’s medium-specific capacity to create textural pixelated images and a sense of embodied intimacy with the figures on screen. Female ASMR-tists by and large are conventionally attractive women who spectacularize their femininity in the video’s diegesis, while at the same time thematizing the process of feminine self-construction through the featured role plays. It is standard for ASMR-tists, for example, to wear heavy, almost stagey makeup in videos, or to include their cleavage within the video’s frame. However, my own analysis is interested in the way that performers highlight the constructed-ness of their appearance through hair, cosmetics, and dress, drawing on this process as a source of intimacy between women. It is no coincidence that makeup artist sessions are one of the most popular genres of ASMR role play. In some sense, ASMR practices enact a kind of affective labor for other women that would usually be performed by women for men in industries like phone sex. In one video, entitled “ASMR HOW I DO MY MAKEUP TO LOOK LESS LIKE DEATH (Softly Spoken),” AmalZD says, “People are like ‘you look so different without makeup’ and I’m like ‘that’s kind of the point isn’t it?”[50] Amal’s comment, delivered in a strange cross between deadpan and soft ditz, drives home the degree to which ASMR’s stagey femininity is often treated as a process of continuous self-configuration performed for other women, a performance which bears both distinctly erotic and maternal valences for its female viewers.

For the straight male viewers who consume these videos, there is an undeniable thrill to the simulated proximity to an attractive woman created by ASMR practice, as evidenced in stray untoward comments littered in ASMR-tists’ comment streams. However, I argue that to reduce ASMR’s erotics to a scopophilic dyad of male viewer as voyeur and female performer as exhibitionist flattens the complex web of desires that may exist between ASMR-tists and their mixed gender audience.[51] To assume that ASMR-tists address themselves only or mostly to men because these women generally adhere to normative codes of femininity also flattens the complexity of the scopophilic drive. Gerturde Koch reminds us that the scopophilic drive can include non-mimetic qualities, for example, a child’s identification with objects in the world and these objects’ material characteristics.[52] I would argue that Koch’s expansion of the category of scopophilia gets at the heart of what is so powerful about ASMR—the practice confronts us intimately with the world’s materiality, objects' sound materality, and the very pleasure of examining every crevice and curve of the performer’s eye.

Laura Marks identifies a visual erotics at work in the video image due to video’s relative lack of quality (compared to 35mm film) and to the relay of visual information from source to screen, which encourages the viewer to develop a more tactile relation with the image.[53] Inthe video “eye gazing,” we can observe the incitement to a kind of erotic tactility that Marks outlines above. Maria stands against an aquamarine curtain framed in close-up, lit by an overhead key light. The light catching certain strands of Maria’s long straight blonde hair echo the vertical weave of the aqua textiles behind her. Soft pastel tones dominate the mise-en-scène. All of these subtle details create a haptic relation to the ASMR image in which the viewer is immersed in the rich, but fuzzy sensory detail of the video surface. Indeed, ASMR embodiment goes beyond its haptic aesthetics and can ultimately be linked to the medium-specificity of the digital image itself. Mark Hansen proposes that the ontological basis for the digital image is fundamentally different than that of the indexical photographic image, that perception of the digital image involves a more embodied and affectively intense process of construction than does the indexical photographic image.[54] Hansen’s phenomenological schema of the digital image helps us to understand why the affective transfer of ASMR is so strong. The very medium specificity of video lends itself to these intensities by encouraging an active, bodily engagement with the image of the performer.

Throughout this paper I address ASMR as a mediatic phenomenon, but ASMR advocates identify sensory meridian response as pre-digital: the halo-like sensation of tingles from real life personal attention, the act of getting a haircut, the feeling of someone gently touching your face. Because not everyone is susceptible to ASMR, it is widely debated whether the sensations associated with the practice are in fact discrete neurological phenomenon or whether they are the result of psychosomatic suggestion.[55] My own approach to analyzing ASMR resists this desire to bestow epistemic certainty on ASMR through scientific knowledge. As Marc Perelman’s compelling study of audiophilia demonstrates, ‘Golden eared’ audiophiles have traditionally claimed their personal experience of listening to music as central to the creation of their subjectivity as music lovers and audio experts beyond the objective claims of sonic quality produced by audio engineering.[56] Likewise, I contend that ASMR should be understood as a ‘golden eared’ listening community in which subjectivity, personal experience, and immersive habits of attention and listening shape ASMR production and consumption, whether the tingles that the practice produces are empirically generalizable or not.

What is fascinating about ASMR as a mediatic phenomenon is the way that the affective transfer between performer and viewer is not dampened by the fact that it takes place over the video medium, but is actually heightened due to the screen’s proximity to the viewer and the use of headphones. I would even argue that the affective charge of the ASMR performer’s physical presence is heightened because of how the sound recording and the video format emphasize embodied intimacy. ASMR, like certain monetized and mediatized care jobs before it—psychic hotlines, cam girl porn, and phone sex—democratizes forms of care that are not only considered to be intimate, but grounded in the unique physical presence of the caregiver. As we will see in the following two sections, ASMR’s offer of instant care, of embodied physical presence, can serve as a powerful repudiation of the norms of work when it circulates in a women’s gift economy. However, as the practice of ASMR increasingly enters a broader capitalist market, the threat of another low-wage occupation for women bolstered by a few wage-earning superstars looms large. Further, ASMR’s unique capacity to physicalize for the viewer the sound-image relation is a highly exploitable characteristic.