Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) is a subjective perceptual sensory phenomenon. Often triggered by certain sensory stimuli or certain social scenarios, especially ones of intimate or personal attention, it typically results in a tingling in the scalp, neck, back, arms. Videos began to appear on social media streaming sites such as YouTube around 2010, which were designed to re-enact scenarios of stimulation and/or reproduce trigger sounds through technologically enabled proximity. Often these videos involve the simulation of therapeutic or caring scenarios, associating an affective pleasure with the experience of care. ASMR videos deliberately draw on the haptic properties of sound to engage the body of the viewer and connects it with body of the “ASMRtist”. Specific sounds such as white noise or those produced by actions such as typing, scraping, brushing, or crinkling can trigger an ASMR response. Further to this, ASMR videos are closely associated with the materiality of the voice. They often, but not always, involve feminine voices with soft or whispered utterances. Although, ASMR has generally been associated with participatory streaming platforms, the sonic stimuli and modes of address associated with ASMR are increasingly becoming apparent in narrative film and quality television drama, particularly during scenes simulating caring scenarios. Drawing on examples from film and television, this paper explores how moving image sound design is increasingly used to replicate or trigger ASMR responses in, or for, audiences within a narrative context.

Dr. Aimee Mollaghan is a Senior Lecturer in Film and Screen Studies at Queen’s University, Belfast. She holds a PhD in Film Studies from the University of Glasgow and a practice as research MPhil in 2D/3D Motion Graphics from Glasgow School of Art. Her main research interests focus on the relationship between music, sound, and the moving image. She is the author of the monograph The Visual Music Film, which focuses on conceptions of musicality in abstract experimental animation and filmmaking practices and is currently writing a monograph on ASMR and Audiovisual Culture for Bloomsbury. Her book Haunted Soundtracks: Audiovisual Cultures of Memory, Landscape and Sound, co-edited with Prof. Kevin Donnelly was published in November 2023. The books contains essays grounded in hauntology, landscape, and moving image sound practices across a range of audiovisual media. She has also published research on the sound and music of experimental moving image, film and television scoring, audiovisual landscapes, and hauntology.