Presentation: Listening to (the ASMR of) Sounding Things (Otherwise Known as Intimacy), with David Toop

Musician and author David Toop has always been fascinated by the micro-audial, sounds so tiny they seem to be nothing – yet we can hear them and they can affect us profoundly. Toop says: ‘There have been many opportunities to listen to tiny sounds in the past eighteen months of solitude, but what interests me is the intimacy of shared listening, what I have described as the mediumship of the listener. A relatively recent model for this kind of listening exists online – ASMR, or autonomous sensory meridian response – a YouTube phenomenon which effectively annihilated all the existing work on shared microaudio listening.’ Through a presentation exploring ASMR, Toop looks into feelings of intimacy, comfort and discomfort that come from close proximity to sensations involving objects and their surfaces, patina, texture and history. This discussion takes place online, but will be streamed for a live audience in Kraków, who can ask questions.