What is ASMR you ask (like you’ve never heard of it)? Why, it’s those whispering perverts who sometimes pop up on your YouTube feed and claim to give you a silly haircut. Short for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, the practice uses visual and vocal techniques to try to induce a tingling sensation (much like when Billie Eilish hums “Happier Than Ever” straight into your lughole). Essentially, you’re supposed to feel good because someone is whispering or clicking softly in your ear while pretending to brush your face with a brush.
It’s an online sensation that somehow defines modern culture. However, for the most part, this burgeoning massive practice isn’t really considered art. It finds itself in its own strange, sequestered realm in the bowels of YouTube, a world apart from mainstream media. However, there is indeed something very musical and performative about it. After all, it’s literally trying to use sound to induce an emotional and physical response in someone.
On YouTube, you’ll find a relatively popular video called Billie Eilish does involuntary ASMR for 27 minutes, but I’d wager that in her music, ASMR is deployed with specific intent. In his music there are often no chord structures in the usual sense. Often her brother and collaborator, Finneas, simply provides the stripped-down beat and Eilish uses her vocals to provide the main melody.
This means that in many of his songs the voice is the most visible instrument. It elevates the voice a step beyond mere crooning, and it also elevates her to one of the world’s most innovative artists in the true postmodern sense. When crooners like Billie Holliday first came along, it was in direct response to the invention of the microphone.
Before that, you had to make sure you were doing it hard enough to reach the back of the room and rise above the instruments. Then all of a sudden you could sing in a low voice and be heard by a concert hall. This meant that singers could load their performances with more nuanced emotions. So you had maestros like Chet Baker – in my opinion, the best crooner of them all – who almost cried throughout ‘I Get Along Without You Very Well’.
So, it supports emotional storytelling via voice pitch. But Eilish’s ASMR-like innovation is to use voice as a tool to literally create a warm mood with a whisper rather than layering her voice with emotional resonance. I mean, it’s there too, but the sound of her sometimes literally whispering takes compliments to the beat like brush strokes to the babbling of an ASMR beauty date.
In some ways, this ties into how cognitively Eilish tunes in. She experiences something called synesthesia which is a condition defined by Frontiers in Psychology medical journal as “a rare experience where a property of a stimulus evokes a second experience unassociated with the first”.
“It doesn’t mean anything,” she adds. However, there is no escaping it when it comes to his creative output. As she continues, “But it inspires a lot of stuff. All of my videos, for the most part, have to do with synesthesia. All of my works of art, all of my—everything that I do lives. All the colors of each song are because they are the colors of that particular song. This is partly why much of his work is minimalist. Eilish doesn’t often throw in an unnecessary middle eight or break up a song’s musical texture for something new.
In short, she knows well the sensory side of music and its psychological impact. Everything must be paired. Therefore, it makes sense that its chamber-bound rhythms would be accompanied by a suitably muffled vocal and comforting melody that such a technique evokes. This means that, much like ASMR, the music is tonally simple – you wouldn’t want a cymbal crashing out of nowhere – but very textured, filled with nuance like the crumpling of paper in some weird librarian roleplay. By being silent, she can fine-tune the miniature details of her voice and ensure they have musical impact. They are basically modern lullabies for stressed adults.
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