In an age where anxiety feels increasingly like the defining emotional state of advanced techno-civilization, it really is no surprise that the types of possible therapeutic intervention have expanded at an unprecedented rate. The inclusion of sonic therapies in this inventory is hardly anything new, even if we strictly limit our timeline to the age of sound recording technology. Albert Ayler once pronounced that music was “the healing force of the universe,” and this sincere benediction has since had its echoes in musical or purely sonic manifestations as diverse as Klaus Wiese’s Tibetan singing bowl drones, the overwhelming “life metal” of Sunn 0))), and the overtone-driven “eternal music” of LaMonte Young: all have had “healing” properties attributed to them by listeners, or have outright laid claim to these properties (or both).
However, something more recent and notable is the association of sound-based therapy with the digital, online world responsible for breeding much of that anxiety. Resident to that world is the sonic phenomenon of ASMR [autonomous sensory median response]. It’s a phenomenn that I’ve put off discussing for years now, as I don’t have much in common with the “Redditor” demographic that seems most enthused about its effects, but nevertheless it can’t be completely ignored by anyone who takes seriously the materiality of sound and the implications that has for beneficially altering reality. At the very least, its methodology needs to be contrasted with that of “sound art” or the “experimental music” that it’s often conflated with by outsiders to those forms and to ASMR: the two separate fields of practice both promise increases in psycho-spiritual wellness in spite of often irreconcilable formal differences, and, very often, differences in philosophical outlook and lifestyle choices among their respective adherents. The question I hope to answer here is what therapeutic functions each of these respective forms can hope to serve – and what any form of aestheticized sound should accomplish if it wishes to be named as a “healing force”.
I suppose insiders could skip over the next two paragraphs, but general politeness nevertheless compels me to provide a brief review of ASMR for the unfamiliar. This phenomenon began to surface around 2010, and was given its name by one Jennifer Allen as a name with an “explicitly clinical valence”[i], that is to say, one NOT as sexually charged as the “orgasm” epithet being thrown around to describe ASMR sensations. The “response” itself has generally been described as a tingling, static sensation localized within the scalp, occasionally journeying down the line of the spine, then branching out along the shoulders and other areas. Said response is triggered by sounds that usually have an intense sense of “tactile”, even synesthetic, presence, yet which are generally perceived as pleasant: repetitive instances of hair brushing, “crisp” / crackling sounds, various types of slow / measured movement, and of course soft kissing and close whispering (one notable study on AMSR had 75% of its respondents claim this as a “trigger” sound, while the ASMR producer named “Gentle Whispering” has been, far and away, one of the most successful individuals in this field)[ii].
Engagement with ASMR is not just therapeutic in the sense that one can receive a kind of instant physical gratification from these triggering sounds, but also with the types of effects associated with pharmaceutical treatment: decreased anxiety regarding the passage of time, or trance-like sense of mental focus. Significantly, these are the same effects pitched by practitioners and enthusiasts of myriad kinds of sound art or experimental music: post-industrial esotericists Coil referred to much of their work as “music which cures you of time.” Much “drone”-based music from LaMonte Young to Eliane Radigue, meanwhile, is sustained (pun not intended) by the promise of an enraptured state that will come about when we stop anticipating a musical “resolution” of sorts, and instead dissolve ourselves within that which we are immediately hearing.
Whatever their precise beneficial effects may be, even those making cursory studies of the subject will intuit that cheekily-named “ASMRtists” view their work as a kind of folk medicine. There are now countless videos based on this phenomenon in which the performers “role-play” as medical professionals, or just as individuals with a “reassuring” aura of authoritative professionalism. This often leads to quite silly dramatizations of these roles, which have caused “real” medical professionals to take note (e.g. “It can feel absurd, as an actual clinician, to watch a layperson on YouTube spend 30 minutes auscultating the air”)[iii]. It also has to be said, for all the ASMR community’s distancing itself from the fetishizing or eroticizing of their output, that the “clinical role-play” videos are strikingly similar in appearance to fetishistic sub-genres of digital pornography based on corny fantasy clichés like the “naughty nurse” or “sex therapist” (such comparison is not helped by what researcher Paula Clare Harper saw as the “hegemonic standards of desirable femininity”[iv] on display in the ASMR role-play videos). All this aside, the hokey trappings of ASMR role-play are just the icing on the cake of a more serious, concerted effort to offer a sort of d.i.y. therapeutic service to their public (and anyway, I doubt that the majority of the “doctor dress-up” scenarios are presented without some humorous self-acknowledgement of their naïveté).
Let’s consider some stats on that public: In Barratt and Davis’ widely-cited study on ASMR, 70% of all respondents relied upon it to “relieve stress,” 82% relied upon it as a sleep aid, and a significant number of (i.e. “many”) participants also based their interest in ASMR on its succeeding where “other interventions, medical or otherwise, had been unable to assist”[v]. Indeed, none other than genre leader GentleWhispering confessed to landing upon her ASMR whispering epiphany after a combination of “meditation videos and massage videos” fell short. The same study also noted personality profiles of those likely to show a sustained interest in ASMR, in particular revealing above-average incidences of “moderate to severe depression,” while a separate study found ASMR enthusiasts to score much higher than the control group on levels of “neuroticism” (indicating “lower levels of emotional stability”)[vi].
The stereotypical image of the “ASMRtist” as a meek, fragile and psychically wounded creature is assuredly helped along by the affinity that this culture expresses for cultural paragons of all things reassuring, non-confrontational, or just conspicuously gentle. Fred Rogers of the classic Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood children’s show, or Bob Ross from The Joy of Painting, are just two of the more obviously cited examples in a pantheon collected in r/unintentionalASMR.
At this point, we can contrast this with the perhaps more favorable, yet still highly generalized, personality profile associated with the “sound artist”: intense, literary, happy to trade off safety and security for the personal growth promised by adventures into the unknown. Also, essentialist and therefore distrustful of the ephemeral or trivial (read: “pop” culture). Such a personality, hardened by an Information Age skepticism, might also be more inclined to view an unvaried sheen of soothing aesthetic features as a malevolent tool of control: for this we have cultural precedents such as the somnolent voice of Hal 9000, or the voices attending the villainous archetype of “progress at any cost” scientific experimenters from Scanners to Beyond the Black Rainbow.
Intriguingly, in the case of Claire Tolan, a “serious” / “critical” sound artist has fused with the “ASMRtist” into a hybrid form, and in the process focuses much more on the deceptive qualities of comforting vocal cadences, or their unsettling potential (she in fact refers to her character in an interview as a “creepy priestess”)[vii]. Another influential example from the sound arts world, which is arguably a “hybrid” between those practices and that of ASMR, is Robert Ashley’s Automatic Writing, in which a disembodied dialogue between (female, French) whispered and (male, English) murmured atoms of phonetic sound float over a bed of synthesis and distant wavering organ sound, making for an aesthetic experience that is at once inviting and disturbing.
Insofar as there is a “healing force” that can be associated with avant-garde forms of music and sound art, it is one more in keeping with shamans’ use of music, and with the mythical character of Orpheus as a shaman-healer: music or “organized sound” writ large are tools for diving into the underworld and returning from it with some unique insight for curing the psychic or physical illnesses plaguing one’s tribe.
This katabasis is not supposed to be easy, in fact much of the music that I find “therapeutic” from within this culture can be deeply unsettling. Many examples from the past century can be brought to bear on this discussion, although two canonical pieces, both of them highly influential on various strains of sonic art, and as far from “gentle whispering” as it’s likely to get, come to mind immediately: Iannis Xenakis’ Mycenae Alpha and Xnoybis by Giacinto Scelsi (himself a one-time psychiatric patient who experienced a sort of therapeutic breakthrough when, during his institutionalization, he played a single note on a piano for a long duration).
The former, composed for the UPIC system (an early breakthrough in the computerized translation of “graphic” scores into audio information), is a full-spectrum, synthetic howl of apocalyptic intensity whose fascinatingly unusual timbres hint at the rigorous, polymath knowledge that went into its construction. Scelsi’s piece, meanwhile, is an eerily glistening suite for solo violin making prominent, novel use of scordatura and metal mutes placed on that instrument. In this piece, characteristic of the composer’s inclination to ‘get inside a single sound’ (his so-called nota sola technique), communicative silences alternate with keening, high-register threads of shifting timbre that get under the skin just as surely as the AMSR “tinglies” massage it. I again stress that these pieces represent something deeply gratifying for those whose who are willing to hear something perhaps outside of customary experience, although their “medicinal” qualities may not be immediately apparent. But so long as I am dabbling in medical analogies here, strictly palliative medicine, acting on its own, is not always an effective therapy in the long term – there has to be something more.
We could possibly view ASMRtists and avant- sound artists / composers as two different types of “therapists”, we might generalize the former is more interested something that is not that distinct from other modern “wellness” practices, i.e. a form of simultaneous stress relief and self-validation. The latter, by contrast, seems to find solace in a practice of meditating upon the interrelation of all phenomena, including those that are not “conventionally” pleasant, and subsequently reaching a state of immersion into a more universal consciousness, or the attainment of a superior perceptiveness. We might say that the dividing line here is one of immersion into sensory phenomena as opposed to ASMR’s more selective approach to it, and this holds especially true for the “intimacy” that is constantly cited as the attractive feature of both “sound art” experiences and ASMR sensations. Enthusiasts of sound art, for example, would have fewer reservations than the ASMR community when using the word “orgasm” to imply a rapturous sonic experience of sound as a material entity: I have personally heard this term used on several distinct occasions while audience members favorably reviewed the experience of lying on a concert venue’s floor as waves of sub-bass frequency, or layers of synesthetic information similar to that featured in Mycenae Alpha, consumed them.
So are there points of reconciliation between these two cultures? Sure, I would say so. We could certainly start with a simple proclamation of Scelsi’s, namely that sound is “never just an acoustic phenomenon, but much more than that!” Much as they might never wish to hang out with one another, I feel ASMRtists and sound artists / experimental composers are at least united in understanding that sound can be much more deeply affective than it is given credit for in a chronically on-screen, visuo-centric civilization. Curiously, there is also a high prevalence of synesthesia among those surveyed as being “triggered” by ASMR,[viii] with this enigmatic form of sensory cross-wiring becoming an increasing area of focus for sonic artists (myself included) who are seeking an alternative to the visuo-centric world’s schemes of social control.
Ultimately, though, we need to return to Ayler’s statement above about the “healing force of the universe”. The Orpheus legend is again useful here in terms of shaping precisely what the sonic artist is meant to do once taking up the mantle of shaman / healer: they mediate between the “underworld” and the land of the living in the same way as deities like Osiris or Persephone, or, less dramatically stated, they reconcile the chthonic and irrational with the in such a way that promotes psychic well-being for themselves and the others in their environment. Along these lines, Scelsi, upon realizing that “the power of sound” was “the basis of everything, that creates and often transforms people”, repeatedly insisted that he was nothing but un postino [messenger] - the transmitting vehicle of something grander than himself. To make use of the “healing force of the universe,” one needs to respect the immensity of that “universe” and contribute to its own expansion in addition to performing maintenance acts on oneself: not all have to radically remove their “selves” from that process (Scelsi, and many future experimenters did this by practically refusing any photographic record of themselves), but this isn’t an entirely bad idea either.
This is where I feel the immediately gratifying ASMR “tinglies” really need to be supplemented by a much more ambitious approach to sound-as-healer; a more wide-ranging diet of sonic information whose effects will be felt over the short and long term. Readers can criticize the mystical / spiritual approach of someone like Scelsi as much as they like, but the fact remains that his profound respect for the living qualities of sound does not require some grounding in Theosophy to be appreciated. In fact, so long as practitioners of ASMR are calling themselves “artists” – even in the somewhat tongue-in-cheek punning sense that the term “ASMRtist” conveys – they owe it to themselves not just to focus on their work’s use as a psychic band-aid, but to consider how ultimately creative their work is.
Clinical therapists often act as mediators between two otherwise irreconcilable parties or states of mind, and I feel mediation is at the root of artistic creation: mediating between different degrees of order, between material and spiritual, between rational and irrational, known and speculative, etc. In a psychic sense, to create (sonically or otherwise) is to heal by filling in the wound-like ruptures that exist between concepts and states thought to be beyond rapprochement. I believe that anyone taking up the gauntlet of Art in earnest, and routinely refining their art to accomplish such feats, will find that the acts of “wellness”-seeking merge almost effortlessly with the acts of boldly creating, whether the resulting creative artifacts be quirky or terrifying. Who knows - maybe we can even create new worlds in which Bob Ross stands placidly at his easel, joyfully painting to the sounds of Xnoybis.
[i] Ahuja, A. & Ahuja, N.K. (2019). “Clinical Role-Play in Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) Videos: Performance and Placebo in the Digital Era”. JAMA, 321(14): pp. 1336-1337.
[ii] Barratt, E.L. & Davis, N.J. (2015). “Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR): A Flow-Like Mental State”. PeerJ, 3(e851): pp. 1-17.
[iii] Ahuja & Ahuja (2019).
[iv] Harper, P.C. (2019). “ASMR: Bodily Pleasure, Online Performance, Digital Modality”. Sound Studies, 6(1): pp.1-4.
[v] Barratt & Davis (2019).
[vi] Ibid.
[vii] Iossifidis, M.J. (2017). “ASMR and ‘The Reassuring Female Voice’ in the Sound Art Practice of Claire Tolan”. Feminist Media Studies, 17(1): pp. 112-115.
[viii] Barratt & Davis (2019).