I am knee-deep in planning for this week with a HUGE Google event in Mountain View and… other things I can’t quite talk about yet, so today’s newsletter will be brief. Before I get to what I released last week, let’s talk about what I released this morning.
In the last handful of years, the term ASMR has become a household name. There was a time when I first heard the term and had to look it up to see what it meant. Back then, it seemed to be heavily referred to in a strange, almost kinky sort of way. Sort of taboo in a way, always delivered by someone with a squinched face as if to signal their displeasure. And perhaps that was a part of the ASMR… thing. I still paid no real attention to it other than to acknowledge that there is a focused community on the Internet for literally EVERYTHING and this ASMR thing, I told myself, must be yet another example of that fact.
Then I started to hear my daughters using the term. They’d see my camera and microphone and ask if they could record ASMR videos. I asked them to show my where they learned the terminology and they directed me to YouTube videos of hosts tapping on boxes with fingernails, brushing microphones with soft makeup brushes, and ringing soft bells.
ASMR stands for autonomous sensory meridian response. My “I don’t even play a Doctor on TV” explanation of it is that it describes the kind of sound that tickles something inside your nervous system that has the little hairs on your arm standing straight up as a result. The kind of sound that gives you goosebumps when you hear them. Sometimes it’s someone talking breathily into a microphone close up to the diaphragm. Sometimes it’s the sounds of (wretch) eating sloppy pasta. Sometimes it’s simply the sound of an undecorated environment. No music to fill the gaps of silence. No detached sounds from what you are watching. It’s the kind of thing a Hollywood sound recordist might be completely focused on when recording on location: Capturing the sound of the environment or subject of the show, and nothing more.
To create more original Shorts content, I’ve been positioning my product unboxings as purely-shorts material. After playing around with different formats, I seem to have landed on a rapid-fire edit with an ASMR soundtrack of the experience. I know ASMR still turns some people away, perhaps because of the whole “kinky” thing I wrote about earlier. In my mind, however, ASMR as the soundtrack to unboxings seems to fit perfectly.
Let’s be real: Only true nerds are going to want to watch someone unbox a piece of tech on video. Part of the reason why, aside from perhaps getting educated on what’s actually IN the box, to begin with, is the tactile and sensory experience itself. As technology enthusiasts, who hasn’t received a gadget they’ve been waiting for only to excitedly open the box. Every piece of kit inside is like another discovery.
“Oooh, what is this for?”
“Aw yeah, I can’t wait to play with that part.”
“A sticker? WHATEVER.”
Part of the sensory experience IS the close-up sound of the unboxing itself. As an audiophile, I’ve been working to create an audioscape for the unboxing videos that sounds crisp, clear, and real, without added background noise to interfere. If I’m doing my job right, the soundscape takes you back to the last time you unboxed something you were really excited about.
It’s a combination of a Zoom H1n stereo recorder pointed at the product just out of the shot along with some light noise reduction in Adobe Premiere and a healthy amount of Audio limiting. I’m quite happy with the way they are coming out!
I don’t have a whole lot to share about this other than to say I’m enjoying my journey into unboxing ASMR. I have definitely heard from some of you who are not fans of the audible experience. I get it. But I invite you to recall what it was about the last time you unboxed “that cool thing” that got you excited, and perhaps you can tap back into that feeling with videos like these.