The sound meaning in ASMR: Listen to the azalea that has long been gone

Core reading

With the form of "sound performance", ASMR simulates or reproduces a pleasant sound in various materials: digging your ears, washing your hair, rain, and sleeping ... The audience can trigger the hearing pleasure in daily life scenes. Since its development in 2009, ASMR has attracted the attention and experience of tens of thousands of enthusiasts. It has many video communities and fan clusters. Hearing cultural phenomenon.

The sound meaning in ASMR:

Listen to the cuckoo that has been gone

Text 丨 Sun Xiaodi

Voice performance and pleasure reproduction

Compared with images, the sound signal can reach the depths of the nerve endings, affecting the sensory interaction between the body and the environment. The development of modern sound medium has made the living places where modern people live in different public hearing space and private hearing space, forming a huge interactive sound landscape.

As Thompson said: "Sound and landscape should be both a physical environment, but also the way to perceive the environment, and the cultural construction presented." In the hearing space constructed by the current sound medium, on the one hand, technology and market With the help of the saying in the production and consumption system, a complete set of "what" and "how to listen" hearing power mechanism is formed in most public hearing space. When the listeners are roaming in different public hearing places, they must not be allowed Do not accept the rules and methods of hearing content and methods; on the other hand, this also provides various ways for listeners from public spaces to private space. ASMR is a hidden type.

ASMR's name comes from a medical color: Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response. The naming person believes: "For things that are difficult to describe and sensitive like ASMR, we need to name this feeling objectively and clearly." But in fact, ASMR is not entered into people's vision as a rigorous biological phenomenon. In the usual network interpretation, it is defined as a wider type of physiological pleasure caused by visual, hearing, touch, etc., including the relaxation and comfort of various parts of the body and psychological depth.

With the form of "sound performance", ASMR simulates or reproduces a pleasant sound in various materials: digging your ears, washing your hair, rain, and sleeping ... The audience can trigger the hearing pleasure in daily life scenes. Since its development in 2009, ASMR has attracted the attention and experience of tens of thousands of enthusiasts. It has many video communities and fan clusters. Hearing cultural phenomenon.

The initial ASMR performance was inspired by people's life experience. Earlier enthusiasts accidentally discovered these "strange pleasant sounds" from daily behaviors such as digging their ears, flipping magazines, and whispering. And they found that when watching or listening to these experiences of others, the stimulus of these specific scenarios and sounds will also trigger vague pleasure. Since 2009, the first performers have begun to imitate these sounds in video or audio, and continue to spread and emphasize this perception experience. Subsequently, this kind of sensory experience that can bring comfortable and pleasant sensory experience has attracted more and more attention from the experiencers, and the development of the live broadcast industry and video communities has led to this boom. Nowadays, more than 10 million enthusiasts have gathered in the video community named ASMR. The comment area is common to "physical and mental comfort, stress release", "relieve anxiety" and "ears feel very comfortable". According to the self -description of ASMR enthusiasts, once this hearing pleasure is evoked, they will be difficult to escape the temptation of ASMR. In daily life, they often use watching ASMR works to decompress, help sleep, and relax. On YouTube, the popular ASMR videos are about 10 million, and the fans of the more well -known ASMR bloggers have reached one million. Essence ASMR has also received strong attention in China, and its development momentum is quite strong. In Douyin and Kuaishou, by imitating foreign forms, users have created a large number of Chinese voice ASMR videos. In addition, as the relevant researchers pointed out: "ASMR has gradually stepped out of the circle of subculture, and has been applied to a variety of media platforms such as advertising, TV series, movies, games, etc., becoming a unique business marketing method." IKEA filmed in 2017 to shoot in 2017 The "opening season" advertisement, by using a series of products such as the down quilt, hanger, wool carpet, and faucet, triggers different sounds to display the different performance of the product. This typical ASMR theme advertisement has aroused widespread attention and discussion.

Today's ASMR performance is basically presented in video. The performance text can be roughly divided into two parts: trigger background and trigger sound. The performers will briefly introduce the trigger and trigger sounds that will appear in the video, as well as the recording equipment and location they use. In the next performance, performers will show the materials and trigger methods that realize triggers, and attract the attention of the experiencer to the attention of the sound itself. Some bloggers often use hourglass, cotton swabs, hair nets, etc. in their videos as triggers. They simulate the rustling sound of flowing water, ears and combing their hair for a long time. Retreating is the invisible background sound. This is also the characteristic of ASMR's performance text. It excludes various "meaningful sounds", such as the melody of music, the content of the language, and the changes in the sound of the sound. It focuses on the simple of sound, the single and the recognition of the single and the scene. This way of performance intentionally simulates a warm, comfortable, and safe bedroom environment, trying to make the audience feel the intimate interaction between people and the environment in private space, thereby evoking their perception pleasure and relaxing the body and psychology. Therefore, the most frequent label in ASMR is "sleep aid". From this, we can find that in ASMR's performance text, the performers can mobilize the interaction between the sensors by simulating or reproducing the sound of cleaning their ears, tapping my nails, massaging scalp, and chewing food; Windows and rolled paper to restore the intimate connection of people and surroundings; whispering, gently coaxing sleep, and role -playing comfort and dialogue is an interactive behavior between human beings and people. By emphasizing the interaction with people or things, coupled with the cooperation with the trigger background and trigger sound, ASMR simulates all kinds of very intimate narrative situations, so that the daily state of life can be virtual in this "Subo bedroom": In the afternoon, I took a nap in the bedroom in the afternoon, listened to the rain outside the window, talked to my lover intimately before falling asleep, and organized the bedroom on the rest of the rest ... When the listeners were walking in ASMR, what I felt was this "immersive" perception experience experience Essence Taking sound as an intermediary, they returned to the intimate interaction between the initial physical and environmental and forgetting the situation.

Some sound scenes in ASMR APP "Tide"

There is a poem: "Taste the memory of the beginning of summer, listen to the cuckoo cry with Er." The travelers among the ancients were in the daily living environment, enjoying the joy of hearing, and emerging. In the Subo bedroom named in ASMR, by reappearing and simulation of the daily noise of daily life, the listeners once again called back the rhododendrons. It is neither the sound of nature from nature nor the sound of life created by humans in the real sense, but an artificial voice presented in an electronic way. The narrative situation of the intimate interaction of the body and the environment, which is the combination of technical means and individual auditory aesthetic experience, and a harmonious sound text performed by the interpretation, which attracts the listeners to keep entering and staying here. In the bedroom, listen to the cuckoo that has been gone.

This is the current brand new sound landscape and auditory aesthetic experience, and it is behind it connecting the auditory modern experience related to this.

Rebuild the broken modern life

On the streets of Paris in the 19th century, Benjamin discovered the image of the famous players. These nice travelers are composed of gamblers, people who pick up garbage, prostitutes, amateur detectives, and literati. They live in a certain place, wander around, and stay on any street of the city at will, becoming the viewer of the city landscape. In Benjamin's view, this group of fable characters is a modern urban image in a highly developed capitalist society. When they started to move their footsteps and look around, urban buildings, cafes, arcade streets, street sculptures, and tree -lined avenues. Everything that belongs to the city began to open in front of them, and then the scene was fleeting. Lost urban wonders. In this dreamy view, they are full of passion, dazzling, and their hearing began to disperse: the crowd's noisy shouts, everywhere walking, the hustle and bustle of the market, the streets of the streets ... The dull and chaotic sound came from the crowded four walls of the living room, exhibition hall, stock exchange, and department stores, and it was "dazzling ears." The image of the wanderer is closely related to the urban experience in the context of modernity, which deeply reflects the changes in the experience and perception of modern urban people. And these sounds mixed with passion and overwhelmed sounds also reflect the modern sexy sexual practice of people in the hearing space.

Sound media technology has made signals and code more finely. Modern commerce is constantly manufacturing, synthesizing, and selling various "sound products" such as spoken sounds, records, sound television, and movies, forming various new sensory consumption methods. These new hearing methods easily occupy the auditory field, forming a huge and degenerate interactive sound space in daily life, making the stroller of Benjamin become a roaming listener. In the electronics era, the most important street space for stratchaters was replaced by the broader and dreamy Cyber ​​space. When the wanderers roam from the city space to the cyber space, the body that had been repeatedly blocked on the street had disappeared. Not only did the body disappear, but the past and future of the street also disappeared. Wandering people walk unimpededly on the streets of Caibo, and everything in the world is displayed in front of them. As long as they are willing, roaming will never end. As Merba Cadi Kain said: "Modernity has promoted the new experience of 'human sensory system', and it has stimulated a new understanding of perception and perception." Among the changes in the production and consumption methods and the changes in the public's auditory interest, the new outline of modern sounds is quietly emerging. The various living places where the wanderers are in today have become the artificial hearing space of the flood of technology. The sound of the artificial hustle and bustle of copying, transcription, and dissemination of the sound of the wanderers are exhausted. The Sabo bedroom named ASMR brings comfort to the endless roaming of the end. In the listening of this gentle, soft, and uniform electronic sound, the bodies of the wanderers are deliberately created by the performers. The narrative was briefly recovered, and it was drawn from the noisy, nowhere to stand, and entered the virtual but comfortable "hearing bedroom".

In the 1960s, McLuhan once pointed out that there was a "blindness of vision" in the electronics era. Reading and writing habits. It makes vision a hegemon of all sensory systems, and is also separated from other senses while excessively developed. McLuhan believes that the closedness, alienability, and strong segmentation of visual space make people "chopped into a nail -like thing" and become a "Gudenburgman" who has shrunk, imagination and emotional separation, It is necessary to establish a "auditory space" that is dominated by hearing experience and various sensory synchronous interaction to heal. The way ASMR tries to this way. The auditory space constructed by ASMR restores the continuity, harmony, and stability of daily life and incompetence, so that the experiencer returns from the divided world to the world of general sense.

On the other hand, the strong body of ASMR is implemented with digital sounds as the intermediary. As some researchers are worried, this superb simulation of real environmental sounds is likely to cause deeper obstruction to the true interaction between people and the environment. In the current media, technology, and social context, the strong dependence on sound medium technology in ASMR's sensory practice may also turn this Sako bedroom into a place for hearing training.

(The author is a graduate student of Chinese Contemporary Literature at the School of Literature of Beijing Normal University)

Content source: "Literature and Art", June 24, 2022, 7th version

WeChat editor: Lu Yimeng

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