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By David Futrelle
Attention all Stacies! Now you and all your, er, foid friends can enjoy all of the thrills and chills of a date with Chad … without the hassle of actually finding yourself a Chad and roping him into a date.
Granted, it’s not a real date, and you won’t be able to have sex with this particular Chad, but if you’re one of those people who gets chills down their spine listening to ASMR videos. and if you have nothing better to do for 22 minutes, this could be the next best thing to the world’s worst date.
H/T — r/IncelTears
It was apparently intended to entrance cats, and I don’t know if it counts as ASMR, but there’s a weirdly hypnotic video in which David Tennant speaks in soothing, Scottish-accented tones, while the camera lingers on landscapes:
http://www.bbcamerica.com/anglophenia/2016/10/watch-david-tennant-narrates-films-geared-toward-cats-and-dogs
This reminds me of a horrible date I went on a few years ago.
Anything I knew about, oh he knew SO MUCH MORE and any hobbies I had, oh, he was SO MUCH BETTER than me and could teach me SO MUCH STUFF. We also discussed how insensitive it was to make jokes about violence on the first date.
At the very end as he was dropping me off, he made some joke about a guy beating up his girlfriend.
This was so ridiculously bad, I honestly wonder now if this guy was trolling me or I was being catfished or something.
@Yutolia
That date sounds awful. Is it possible he was a PUA or something similar? What he did sounds a lot like some form of negging. Or maybe it’s just entitlement.
@Naglfar:
That looks like the CN Tower on that album cover.
*checks Google*
Okay, Woods of Ypres is originally from Windsor, Ontario, and operated out of Toronto for a few years. That explains that.
@Jenora
They also had a lot of songs, mostly on their other albums, about life in Ontario or places in Ontario. Most notably the songs Your Ontario Town Is a Burial Ground, December in Windsor, I Was Buried in Mount Pleasant Cemetery, and Crossing the 45th Parallel.
re: same;
There’s an ancient (late 50’s – early 60’s) song Rhythm of the Rain by The Cascades which begins with thunder/rain sounds. The song isn’t remarkable, just 50’s mono R&B, but it sounds like there’s a lot more depth in it than other contemporary stuff, I THINK it’s because when I hear the intro, I attune to the song.
@Weird Eddie
My favorite song that starts with thunder samples is this:
ASMR can take different forms, so while I dislike the ASMR videos that generally have human noises like whispering, I love hearing food and cooking sounds. Like chopping vegetables, boiling water, or something sizzling in a pan. So I have to specify “no talking” when looking for a cooking ASMR video.
@Cat Mara,
I think it was either here at WHTM, or possibly at Pharyngula, where I first heard ASMR described, and I was like “OMG, you mean it’s not just me? This thing I’ve had since childhood isn’t just a weird malfunction of my own?”
It’s never felt sexual for me either, though I can’t say I disapprove of other people if they experience it that way. For me, the emotional component feels like extreme comfort, a total lack of cares about the world for just that brief period. And I associate it, somehow, with childhood. As a little kid, I liked to be alone, but I think I must have also had some fear of abandonment. I have a memory of sitting alone in my bedroom, and hearing quiet sounds of my mother moving around in another room, and thinking “this is fine” (unironically: there was no fire). And that memory sometimes comes to mind when I experience ASMR. As if, on some level, I have the feeling “someone cares about me”. This could explain a discrepancy: I enjoy ASMR videos with hair-cutting sounds (distant memories of mum cutting my hair?), but getting it cut for real is just a chore, and does nothing for me.
Still, though, it’s hard to make sense of why it’s enjoyable to listen to paper being folded, or rain falling on a tent, or fingernails on a rough surface.
@Prith kDar — I also hate the whispering child bottled water commercial, and now that you mention it I do tense up at the whispering children shtick in horror movies. I also second your “rage” at wanting to shut them up, and I fully recognize your hyperbole in which you end up in jail for shutting them up. I make such completely exaggerated statements too. (No one here wants to actually hurt children for being annoying.)
I’ve also wondered if there are actually people who find these “children whispering” ads endearing. Ugh, no friends of mine, that’s for sure.
@Knitting Cat Lady — Misophonia! Yes! I forgot that was a thing, but count me in on that one.
@LG — I got where Prith kDar was coming from. There is no need to think real children are at risk.
~~~
Although I won’t identify as liking ASMR, I do find a cat’s purr to be heavenly, some cats more than others (the louder the better). I love my hens clucks. I’ve even grown to translate the nearby freeway’s noise as being ocean wavelike, with the ebb and flow of traffic.
Out of curiosity, is this the water commercial everyone is talking about with the whispering children?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeF134YMoS0
I searched up “whispering children bottled water commercial” and this was the first result. Count me in on the people who hate this. Something about it just creeps me out.
This seems to be aspiring to be The Continental: ASMR Edition.
(A bit of obscure U.S. television history may be in order: perhaps you’re familiar with those Saturday Night Live sketches in which Christopher Walken is subjecting the Fourth Wall to skeevy coercive courtship tactics? Walken is satirizing an actual thing: in 1951, during the infancy of television, there was an experimental TV show called The Continental: a sort of virtual date wherein Renzo Cesana played a fantasy Latin Lover for the late-night presumed female target audience, addressing sweet nothings to the viewer. No footage of the show itself seems to have survived, but it inspired numerous parodies–including a Pepe LePew cartoon.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Continental_(TV_series)
So relaxing:
@Naglfar:
Hmm, The Cascades, then Slayer…
wow, that could be LETHAL!!!
@Naglfar: I don’t think it was PUA stuff, it was more entitled ‘I’m a nerdy guy so I must be way smarter than dumb blonde I’m on a date with’
I refused to see him again and I think he told a bunch of people in our friend group bad stuff about me since everyone started treating me a lot differently after I wouldn’t see him again.
I have much better friends now.
@Weird Eddie
This isn’t The Cascades, and I don’t think if it would be considered RnB, but there is a mashup of “South of Heaven” by Slayer and “War” by Edwin Starr.
Yeah, as a misophonia sufferer I really can’t get on with ASMR, with the exception of cat noise ASMR because I bloody love cats.
My trigger noises include pouring liquids, loud munching, and cracking sounds, so most adverts set me off really badly. I can’t imagine willingly subjecting yourself to these things!
@Prith kDar, if you’re experiencing that strong an aversion to the sound of children’s voices then I’d say you definitely have it. A lot of misophonia sufferers report feelings of rage/aggression in response to trigger sounds that goes entirely against their normal inclinations. I’ve had to avoid eating with my family before because my brother is a noisy eater and the impulse to physically attack him when he’s setting me off is so strong that it’s incredibly distressing.
@ Naglfar:
THAT MASHUP IS WONDERFUL, THANX!!!
@Weird Eddie
Glad you like it so much. The same creator also made a mashup of “Walking on Sunshine” by Katrina and the Waves and “Chemical Warfare” that is basically the inverse (Tom Araya’s vocals over pop instrumental).
@Full Metal Ox — I had no idea that The Continental was a thing prior to Christopher Walken’s ***sublime*** SNL character. It really makes me think of it differently now…
When I’m YouTube surfing I find myself looking at old SNL sketches and big ol’ movie meanie, Christopher Walken was always one of the funniest, one of the best hosts. My husband laughs more at the More Cowbell sketches though. Will Ferrell’s gut was almost the star of that sketch.
@CarrieV: thank you for getting it. Since I don’t really encounter whispering children in my daily life, it’s not like I’m fighting urges to do harm to children on the regular. Just when they whisper at me in ads and trailers on tv. Plus they’re invisible. Fortunately, I have a mute button on my remote.
For the record, I don’t feel enraged at young Haley Joel Osment when he whispers, “I see dead people.” He whispered a lot in that movie, and it didn’t bother me at all. So maybe it depends partly on whether I can see them or not.
I guess I’m not that crazy about invisible adults whispering in ads either. I know I don’t like even visible adults whispering in ASMR videos. But maybe that’s because they sound phony. And children speaking normally don’t bother me either. They can actually be heart-meltingly cute, as long as they’re not trying to be.
It does bother me when the neighborhood children scream when they’re playing, but it’s not the noise, it’s the fear that they’re really screaming, like in terror or pain, so I can’t just ignore it, but have to keep listening for any cues that it might be an actual emergency. Yelling with outdoor voices is fine, but screaming is troubling.
@Naglfar: yes, that’s the ad. I just didn’t want to give them any free advertising. 😉
Some links
For thunder sounds, there is a piece by ambient musician Robert Henke called “Studies for Thunder” which is just over 20 minutes long:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nixGeyMXvDY
The German band Einstürzende Neubauten (who are generally much noisier than this, especially in their earlier days) have a song “Wüste” (“Desert”) where there is the sound of a couple of tonnes of sand pouring through a big funnel!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L39rEFh-B80
There is also another band, Deaf Centre, whose music tends to have a lot of ASMR-y elements: clicks, scratching and tinkling sounds, that sort of thing. I don’t know anything about them so I don’t know if it’s deliberately intended to appeal to the ASMR crowd or just some musique concrete thing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1hzuQtL7H0
(Note: those last two have whispered vocals so fair warning if that sets your teeth on edge)
There’s an Evanescence song with thunder samples. It can actually be startling because one of them is right after a very quiet bit.
No mention of the Doors’ “Riders on the Storm”?
@Moggie:
No mention of the Doors’ “Riders on the Storm”?
Beat me by about an hour and a half; there are songs that, upon contact with my particular brain, create their own self-contained world; “Riders on the Storm” is a songsphere of rain, brooding, and mysterious portent.
(To digress: my personal associations re “Moving in Stereo” are so dissonant as to amount to an Unpopular Opinion, and may have something to do with the facts that:
A. I’ve never actually seen Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and
B. The song came out at about the same time as William Gibson’s Neuromancer. Therefore: my “Moving in Stereo” is a chill argon-blue compartment of metal, tubes, and icy detachment–I remember lying in bed listening to it on WTUE-FM and imagining myself patiently dormant in a cryogenics capsule, blue ichor flowing sluggishly in my veins, receiving cryptic telepathic communications. (I somehow have a memory of having done this during the U.S. Blizzard of ’78, but that’s a chronological impossibility.)