Ambience!
What with the pandemic and stuff, many of us have not done much traveling the past year.
But did you know that you could even go to places that don’t exist? From the comfort of your living room? You could right now, and for free, kinda sorta perambulate to parts unknown and non-extant. Just go to YouTube!
You can be in the Hogwarts Library. Rain is falling, a fire is crackling, and you can lull yourself to these ambient noises. Add a quill scribbling on parchment. And perhaps a book floating in the air, framed pictures with people in them smiling at you. Or whatever.
That’s the world of ambience videos, a subcultural genre of YouTube videos blending soundscapes and scenescapes to translocate you to a new world. Or to a jazz bar in Paris, or a swamp teeming with wildlife trilling, croaking, squawking, chirping, and warbling.
Reported The New York Times:
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.”
Tons of such things are available for you. Melinda Csikós (from Budapest) has a channel called Miracle Forest.
I have a subway ambience, where a person commented—from New York, I think—that they weren’t able to take the subway in a year and it was nice for them to listen to this ambience because they like taking the subway and they miss it.”
Just in time for the season, she also has “A Spooky Graduation ASMR Ambience.”
[ASMR = autonomous sensory meridian response, those pleasant brain-tingles some seem to get when watching to stimulating videos or listening to gentle sounds like whispers, footsteps, and such.]
There’s pretty much a video for whatever taste and mood you’re in. Of course, libraries and cafes are popular, but you can even experience a carriage ride through the woods, be enchanted in a haunted Victorian manor, or even listen to a whole hour of Olivia Rodrigo’s hit single “Driver’s License” edited as if it’s playing in an adjoining room during a rainstorm.
Confessed Ms. Csikós:
I started watching ambience videos in 2013, when I was having a really bad time mentally and struggling with anxiety. I had them on in the background very often, and I used them to meditate as well, to just shut everything down around me and bring myself into a calm space.”
Doctoral student at Aarhus University in Denmark, Helle Klausen calls it “self-medicating media.”
As soon as you have entered this universe, you don’t have to give it any more thought. There are no sudden sounds. There’s no narrative you have to keep up with in order to be a part of it. You know what’s going to happen, and it’s predictable in a very safe and soothing way.”
Said another ambience video creator, Claire:
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.”
“Shifting,” it is apparently called, a move into a different reality.
Nice, but the best of all realities is the REALEST reality, the presence of God.
Set your mind on the things above,
not on the things that are on earth.
Colossians 3:2
SOURCE:
The New York Times
Abe Kuruvilla is the Carl E. Bates Professor of Christian Preaching at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (Louisville, KY), and a dermatologist in private practice. His passion is to explore, explain, and exemplify preaching.