Watching some of the most popular ASMR videos on Youtube one thing stands out. They all use cheap microphones. Besides that, the microphone is often touched to produce the sound, which makes the resulting sound at least partly distortion. It is interesting to me then how the sounds people listen to for this sense of intimacy and proximity to another person are in fact partly the sound of the electronic medium.
I also noticed that in my recordings using the DPA microphones: I would only get the desired texture when placing the microphone millimeters away from the source or even touch it directly.
Brings back this passage I read in Voice: Vocal Aesthetics in Digital Arts and Media (related to voice for performance but I believe applies to all sound):
‘the performative voice is quintessentially paradoxical in Mladen Dolar’s sense and uncanny in Freud’s sense of unheimlich or unhomely. It carries a trace of its ‘home’, the body of the speaker, but leaves that home to perform speaking. And, if we consider voice in digital media, it is even more uncanny, in that it has a second home – the digital realm of ones and zeroes – yet must leave that home, and indeed the digital realm, to perform differently, to sound analogically. ‘
While it may not sound like a big discovery, it connects some dots for me. Last year while playing with the hardware synthesizers I became very interested in the tiny, sort of popping – clicking sounds they can produce (please see the blogpost titled Popping Candy). Delicious sounds, that’s how I used to think of them.
What creates such a response? Do we maybe associate them with static electricity (created by materials being in contact with each other)? The tingling sensation you’d get from a tiny electric shock?