As evidenced by these posts, the response to ASMR videos is very personal. Someone whispering in your ear may be sexy to one person, but extremely irritating to another. I leave it to psychology experts to figure out what causes good goosebumps (ASMR) using audio. However, I find the technology interesting. Binaural audio, like 3D, has a limited effective range. That's why Hollywood "throws" stuff at you in 3D movies because visually, beyond say 100 feet, you don't care much about 3D since the scene essentially appears as two dimensional. Same with binaural audio. If the audio source is too distant, you might not care about that either. However, the sound of someone whispering in your ear is closer, and you are more likely to attend to the sound intimately.
I personally didn't find these videos very effective as ASMR goes, but that's just me. Too me, the whispering was too close and consequently it sounded like someone merely applied a stereo ping-pong filter to the audio. It didn't help that whispering didn't match with the distance to the visuals or with the actual content of the message. The woodworking video again mismatched the distance and location of the sound. At times the rasping was in the "middle" of your head and not 6 feet away and off to one side. The crunching and tapping videos could have been done without binaural audio since the source location was unimportant. I can be such a critic, but I have to acknowledge that it is really hard to exploit binaural audio especially if you are trying for ASMR.
Regardless, if these video are used to sell iPhones, I think Apple put the cart before the horse on the marketing side of things. These videos would really only be significant if Apple was selling an iPhone with left and right microphones that could process and enhance the production of binaural audio. What you would record with your ASMR compatible iPhone to tickle your eardrums would then be up to you. But then again, it would be an iPhone feature that very few people would fully utilize.
There is one application which might prove interesting and that is if movie theatres would implement binaural audio.
I was just looking at AmpMe technology and thought this would be a perfect fit for re-energizing a portion of the movie theatre industry.
I know a lot of people that avoid going to the movies because they find the sound way too loud to enjoy comfortably. What if there were a way to individualize this experience?
I was thinking that you could equip theatres with a modified version of AmpMe. The AmpMe system would broadcast/stream holophonic 3D audio of the movie to an app on the patrons' own iPhone in order to hear the movie’s soundtrack! BYOH(headphones), sort of an audiophile’s version of theatre.
The result would be a quiet theatre with an audience enjoying immersive 3D audio of the movie at a level they could enjoy without affecting others.
