Australian artists cash in on Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response YouTube videos showing people whispering

Updated

Millions of people around the world are tuning in to watch YouTube videos of people whispering and Australians are among the artists cashing in.

Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) involves artists whispering into the camera while performing mundane tasks like folding towels, brushing hair or pretending to perform medical examinations.

7.30 visited the undisputed global queen of ASMR, Maria (known as GentleWhispering), at her apartment in Baltimore where she makes her videos.

"ASMR stands for autonomous sensory meridian response and it's usually described as a vibration or a tingling sensation that starts from the top of your head and travels down into your neck and your shoulders," she said.

Maria's videos have had more than 80 million hits - more than 7 million for a 16-minute clip of her with a hairbrush, 500,000 for a clip of her folding towels and nearly as many for a clip of her reading the newspaper.

Maria said ASMR does not work for everyone but when it does, it really hits you, and that explains the popularity.

"If you think that regular people feel a calming sensation, we feel it like explosions in our head, it literally feels like explosions in our head, it literally feels like a euphoria," she said.

"So it just takes you to a much higher place than you would ever imagine."

Maria has had stalkers so she keeps her last name a close secret.

Impact of videos 'like adult calming a child'

There is no scientific evidence to back her loosely-defined tingling phenomena but she claims it reduces anxiety and insomnia.

"It feels as if an adult is calming their child, and it feels like you are a child and somebody's being very attentive to you," she said.

"So it's very pleasant to hear, especially in a hard time.

"I get messages from absolutely all types of people, from all walks of life, from lawyers to single mums, to veterans, to politicians, pilots ... teenagers.

"People, they literally pour their hearts out in the messages and just say that 'you changed my life'."

Australia has its own ASMR sensation on YouTube - Dmitri Smith from the Gold Coast - who specialises in role play.

When 7.30 visited his home studio he was putting on goggles, a jacket and a gun to transform into his character Captain Aliathon.

"A couple of my original ideas were to create like a futuristic doctor examination, because people quite like a medical examination," he told 7.30.

"The most popular role play is probably what's referred to as the cranial nerve examination."

The Captain Aliathon video has been viewed more than 170,000 times and while it is weird, it is also proving lucrative.

"I'm hoping that in the very near future that the money that I generate through YouTube ads might be similar to what I earn in a job so that I can focus on creating the videos full-time," Mr Smith said.

ASMR may trigger childhood memories, whisperer says

Other videos focus on sounds - viewers say many different things trigger the tingling sensation they crave.

"It can be as simple as going to your kitchen cupboard and finding like a nice packet that makes a crinkle sound," Mr Smith said.

"I have an object called the silver soap which seems to have its own unique sound that I haven't been able to find anywhere else."

In Melbourne, Lauren Ostrowski Fenton, known as the whispering mother, was preparing her latest video.

She thought ASMR worked by triggering the release of the hormone oxytocin.

"There's no proven research at the moment but a lot of people are saying, and I believe, that it takes you back to a memory you have of a caregiver," she said.

"It may be your mother or another caregiver and when there's an experience between a mother and a child, the mother and a child both release oxytoxin and this helps the child to get to sleep and it helps the child to stop crying."

Ms Ostrowski Fenton was not worried the lack of clinical research would condemn ASMR to an internet fad.

She was optimistic scientific validation would come soon.

"What is a fad? A fad is something that suddenly explodes like mushrooms and then dies down," she said.

"How can something that makes people feel just good be a fad?

"It is going to take over the world and it is going to be used, like massage, as a supportive therapy."

Topics: internet-culture, information-and-communication, contemporary-art, arts-and-entertainment, performance-art, offbeat, human-interest, australia, united-states

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