Thursday, February 9, 2017

"the food-centric ASMR community has seen a sudden ascendance up the rungs of YouTube and Reddit worlds"

Eater:
On September 6, 2016, Rebekkah, better known by her YouTube channel name Hungry Cakes, uploaded a 13-minute-long video titled “ASMR: Taco Bell Taco Supreme *Eating Sounds*.” The video begins with the young woman sinking her teeth into a golden hard-shelled Taco Supreme

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Tired of cooking shows with egocentric hosts and cheesy music, he focused his show entirely on meal preparation and made special use of the sounds that occurred naturally as he was cooking.

When he posted a video showing how to make a gooey grilled cheese sandwich, Nelson realized that his hits weren’t coming from an audience in need of cooking lessons. Many of his viewers were captivated instead by the tingling sensations his video triggered.

“The ASMR crowd [on Reddit] got ahold of them,” Nelson says. “I had no idea what it was, so I Googled it, and [I was] fascinated.” Although he doesn’t experience the tingles from ASMR, he believes that almost everyone reacts in same way to soft sounds like the sensual hiss produced by searing a steak or light metallic scratches from a metal whisk. After awakening to this previously unknown audience, he began focusing on these sensory effects. “I decided to have that really be at the forefront of my videos,” Nelson says. “So now they’re all about the visuals and they’re all about the sound.”