We are in the Times!! So happy to see Ambience videos getting recognition in the media! Thank you New York Time and talented writer Eliza Brooke!
Read the article here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/16/style/ambience-videos-asmr-youtube.html
The Soothing, Digital Rooms of YouTube
Ambience videos pair relaxing soundscapes with animated scenery to make viewers feel immersed in specific spaces, like a cozy library. They’re big with “Harry Potter” fans.
By Eliza Brooke
Feb. 16, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET
Picture this: You’re in the Hogwarts library. Rain falls outside, a fire crackles across the room, and somewhere offscreen, quills scribble on parchment. You might look up from time to time to see a book drifting through the air or stepladders moving around on their own. Or maybe, you’ll feel so relaxed, you nod off to sleep.
Welcome to the world of so-called ambience videos, a genre of YouTube video that pairs relaxing soundscapes with animated scenery in order to make viewers feel immersed in specific spaces, like a jazz bar in Paris or a swamp populated with trilling wildlife.
They are part of a long tradition of audiovisual products and programming designed to make a space feel a little more relaxing, a little nicer.
Consider the black-and-white footage of a crackling yule log that the New York television channel WPIX debuted on Christmas Eve 1966 — grandfather to the many digital yule logs available today — or the rise of white noise machines that fill a room with the sound of crashing waves, chirping crickets or falling rain.
But recently, this genre of video has attracted new fans who want to be transported beyond the same four walls they’ve been staring at for the better part of a year.
‘Harry Potter’ and Chill
The genre is a close cousin of A.S.M.R. (autonomous sensory meridian response) videos, which are meant to evoke the pleasant brain-tingling sensation that some people experience when they hear sounds like hair brushing, nail tapping and soft whispers.
But ambience videos are differentiated, their creators say, by their purpose — not necessarily to give the tingles, but to relax and soothe a viewer by means of an immersive experience.
There’s a video for just about every taste and mood. Library and cafe environments tend to be popular, but viewers can also enjoy the more specific experience of a carriage ride through the woods, a haunted Victorian manor, the RR Diner from “Twin Peaks” or a full hour of Olivia Rodrigo’s hit single “Driver’s License” edited to sound like it’s playing in another room during a rainstorm.
“Harry Potter” videos have become a major theme across the ambience genre. Hogwarts settings strike a compelling balance of being cozy and study-friendly, and they certainly have transportive potential.
“It’s not something you can have in real life. It’s a fantasy, so I wanted to have that fantasy where people can actually spend time in their favorite novels,” said Claire, an ambience video creator who runs a popular YouTube channel called ASMR Rooms and has many that are Harry Potter themed. (The New York Times has allowed Claire to be identified by her first name only because of previous internet harassment.)
“If you go back to my very first video, I literally slapped a fireplace into a Hogwarts common room, and that was it,” Claire said.
Since she uploaded that video in 2015, her fantasy-themed ambience work has gotten a lot more elaborate. She records audio at home and in the wild as much as possible — capturing the sound of pages flipping, or bird song and rain while she’s out on hikes — and has been building a library of original sounds so that she doesn’t have to license them from a stock catalog.
She has hired artists to draw indoor scenes for her videos, which she then animates, and once hired a voice actress with an uncanny knack for imitating Emma Watson to read a script as Hermione Granger. (Recently she noticed people talking about “shifting” in the comments section of her Hogwarts Express video. The term, which has gained traction on TikTok, refers to trying to move oneself into a different reality — often the world of “Harry Potter,” according to i-D magazine.)
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https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/16/style/ambience-videos-asmr-youtube.html
