Is Billie Eilish the first musician influenced by ASMR?
What is ASMR you ask (as though you’ve never heard of it)? Why, it’s those whisper perverts who appear on your YouTube feed sometimes and pretend to give you a daft haircut. Short for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, the practice uses visual and vocal techniques to try and induce a tingling sensation (a bit like when Billie Eilish hums ‘Happier Than Ever’ directly in your lughole). Essentially, you’re supposed to feel all cosy because someone is whispering or making gentle clucking sounds in your ear while pretending to stroke your face with a brush.
It’s an online sensation that, in a weird way, defines modern culture. However, for the most part, this massive booming practice isn’t really considered art. It sits 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 is quite literally trying to use sound to induce an emotional and physical response in someone.
On YouTube, you will find a relatively popular video titled Billie Eilish does unintentional ASMR for 27 minutes, but I’d wager that, in her music, ASMR is deployed with definite intention. In her music, there often aren’t any chordal structures in the usual sense. Often her brother and collaborator, Finneas, simply provides the bare-bones beat and Eilish uses her vocals to provide the topline melody.
This means that in many of her songs, the voice is the most prominent instrument on display. This raises the vocals to a step beyond mere crooning, and it also elevates her towards being one of the most innovative artists around in the true postmodern sense. When crooners like Billie Holliday first arrived, it was in direct response to the invention of the microphone.
Prior to that, you had to ensure you were belting it out loud enough to reach the back of the room and rise over the instruments. Then all of a sudden, you could sing with a hush and have a concert hall hear you. This meant that singers could laden their performances with more nuanced emotion. Thus, you had maestros like Chet Baker – in my opinion, the finest crooner of them all – almost weep his way through ‘I Get Along Without You Very Well’.
So, that takes care of emotional storytelling via the pitch of vocals. But Eilish’s ASMR-like innovation is to actually use the voice as a tool to literally create a cosy mood with a whisper rather than layering her voice with emotional resonance. I mean, that is also there, but the sound of her sometimes literally whispered takes compliments the beat like the brush strokes to the babbling of some ASMR beauty appointment.
In some ways, this is tied into how attuned Eilish is cognitively. She experiences something called Synesthesia which is a condition defined by Frontiers in Psychology medical journal as “a rare experience where one property of a stimulus evokes a second experience not associated with the first.”
“It means nothing,” she adds. However, it can’t be escaped when it comes to her creative output. As she continues: “But it inspires a bunch of stuff. All of my videos, for the most, part have to do with synesthesia. All of my artwork, all of my—everything I do live. All the colours for each song is because those are the colours for those songs specifically.” This is part of the reason why much of her work is minimalist. Eilish doesn’t often throw in a needless middle eight or break the musical texture of a song for the sake of something new.
In short, she is well aware of the sensory side of music and its psychological impact. Everything has to be paired. Therefore, it makes sense that her bedroom-bound beats are accompanied by a suitably hushed vocal and comforting topline melody that such a technique evokes. This means that, much like ASMR, the music is tonally simple – you wouldn’t want a crashing cymbal out of nowhere – but highly textured, filled with nuances like the crinkling of paper in some strange librarian role play. By being hushed, she can tweak the miniature details in her voice and ensure that they have a musical impact. These are, in essence, modern lullabies for stressed-out grown-ups.
