The auditory aesthetic of social media food content is designed to make us want to eat or cook
Kasim Hardaway was certain he’d gotten the money shot: air-fried chicken wings turned a golden-brown and bathed in winter sunlight, a knife scraping against them to demonstrate how perfectly crisped they were.
But then the snowblowers started up, harmonizing with snow shovels grinding against the pavement. The morning after a snowfall, it turned out, was not the time to film content for Instagram and TikTok, where most of Hardaway’s videos are scored with the satisfying sounds of cooking.
Knife-scraping is a signature Hardaway sound bite, as is the hiss of meat hitting a hot pan, sauce splashing into a pot, the delicate crunch of salt flakes rubbed between the fingers as they are sprinkled atop a dish.
In the last three years, he’s leaned in hard to the trend of ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) cooking videos, in which sounds are deliberately engineered to send a tingle of pleasure down listeners’ backs.
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Sound has the unique ability to transcend boundaries that visuals alone cannot, drawing audiences in and triggering memories. For some, these videos are purely entertainment; for others, they stimulate the appetite and serve as inspiration to cook.
“We’re all kind of Pavlov’s dogs, so we should be as easily cued to want to eat [something] … by the sound of its preparation,” says Charles Spence, an experimental psychologist at Oxford University who has studied the way the senses are activated by food.
Sound usually isn’t the first sense one associates with cooking, but it’s a powerful one. And it’s even more powerful when it’s right in our ears. Hearing an egg being cracked might elicit a stronger tingling sensation when heard through headphones than from a TV across the room, according to Spence. His Ig Nobel Prize-winning research, done with a fellow scientist, found people perceived the chips they were eating as fresher and tastier when the sound of their chewing was electronically modified and heard through headphones.
Neuroscientists have observed the way sound can trigger memory retrieval, anticipation and pleasurability – even if the accompanying images are new or exotic.
You might watch a TikTok of a woman in rural China squatting in front of a giant pan set over hot coals, frying some locally-harvested garlic chives in oil. Even if the setting and ingredients are unfamiliar, the sound can still generate a feeling of connection to the content.
“In every kind of cuisine you have a sizzling pan, because everybody, pretty much, cooks food in one,” says Mario Ubiali, the founder of Thimus, a company that uses neuroscience to understand how humans experience food.
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Capturing and amplifying the most routine kitchen sounds can create a more immersive experience for viewers, something Vancouver creator Christine Chan tapped into when she was making cooking videos.
“It’s almost as if when there’s sound, that person is right next to you, preparing that meal,” she said.
Paying close attention to the sound in the videos also helps her slow down.
Chan, a mother of two, said the cooking she does for her family is often harried and utilitarian but when she creates content for her Instagram – where she will spend an hour shooting a dish that would otherwise take her 10 minutes to make – time stretches out and the process becomes almost meditative.
“I’m trying to show through my video that it can be an enjoyable experience, to savour every part of it, including the sounds of every action: opening packages, searing something, washing your ingredients.”
Dieppe, N.B.-based chef Dennis Prescott, author of Cook with Confidence, has noticed that his videos with more prominent ASMR perform better with his audience.
In his video for chicken fricot – a chicken-and-dumpling soup made in the French Canadian part of New Brunswick – he pumps up the sound of carrots and celery sweating in a hot pan, of broth sloshing through a strainer, of fat rendering out of a chicken leg and crisping it up.
“If you didn’t grow up there, you might not have a connection point to that dish, but you do have a connection point to those sounds that happen in the kitchen,” he says.
Prescott, who scripts, shoots and edits all his posts, uses a shotgun microphone on the top of his video camera to cleanly pick up the crackle of peppercorns put through a grinder or the crunch of a lobster tail being twisted off its body. Sometimes, when he’s watching the clips back, he’ll notice a particular sound is too muted, or a dump truck outside can be heard in the background. He’ll search through the massive media library he has stored on hard drives to replace the audio with a cleaner facsimile, the way a foley artist might for a film.
But for the millions who get delicious shivers down their spine while watching these videos, not all sounds stimulate the appetite.
To some ears, the squelch of dijon being squeezed out of a plastic bottle can evoke memories of being in the bathroom with food poisoning. The soft, wet squish of rigatoni being tossed in vodka sauce can sound a bit too anatomical.
People who have an aversion to these videos, or may even suffer from misophonia (an extreme sensitivity to certain sounds), let their displeasure be known.
“I get a fair amount of hate on the ASMR,” Hardaway says. “People are like, ‘I’m literally gonna block you because you ruined my day.’”
Those strong reactions might come from the fact that sound is a powerful vehicle for conveying texture – and texture in food can be very polarizing.
In 2016, Italian chef Massimo Bottura, whose restaurant Osteria Francescana has earned three Michelin stars, created a video with the New York Times in which he prepares his modernist take on lasagna – made with spinach pasta chips and wafers of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese – in a soundproof room fitted with microphones. The video developed a cult following for how ASMR-loaded it was, and culminated in Bottura loudly crunching through the lasagna chips.
Fittingly, one of Prescott’s most-viewed videos is 21 seconds of him cutting off a slice of lasagna he’s retrieved from the fridge and frying it in oil (sizzle! crackle!) to give it a caramelized crust.
“Folks are like, ‘Oh my God, I know that taste. I know biting into that corner edge. I want to make that now,” Prescott said.
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