ASMR generator

How to use it

Put your headphones on and press Play. The Starter mix begins with tapping, brushing, crinkling and a quiet whisper, each coming from a different place around your head. The picture above the controls shows you from above, with a ripple wherever a sound happens.

Try a preset to hear what the tool can do, then turn any sound up or down. A slider at zero turns that sound off. Once you change something, the mix becomes Your own mix. Copy a link to this mix saves it, so you can come back to it or send it to someone. If you don’t know where to start, press Surprise me for a new random mix of three to five sounds.

The sounds

• Tapping on wood: fingertips and nails on a wooden box, sometimes slow single taps, sometimes a quick nail flutter, sometimes little tap-tap patterns.
• Tapping on glass: nails on a glass jar, with a soft ring after each tap.
• Scratching: nails dragged back and forth across a textured surface.
• Brushing: soft and crisp brush strokes, like a make-up brush across a microphone.
• Soft whispering (no words): the breathy sound of a whisper, with no actual words, so there’s nothing to follow.
• Crinkling: plastic wrapping and paper handled close to your ear.
• Bubble wrap: single pops, and every now and then a quick twist of several.
• Pouring sand: a fine stream of grains pouring onto a tray.
• Water drops: drips into water, small and deep.
• Turning pages: a page turned now and then, and sometimes a quick flick through.
• Keyboard typing: someone typing at their own speed, with the space bar, a correction or two and the odd pause.
• Pencil writing: a pencil writing words on paper, dotting the occasional i.
• Rain on a window and Crackling fire: gentle backgrounds that stay wide around you instead of in one place.

What the settings do

• Pace goes from very slow and sleepy to fast & aggressive, a popular ASMR style with quick, busy tapping and scratching. It changes how often each sound happens and how quick the strokes are.
• Closeness moves the sounds from across the room to right by your ear. Close up, there’s less room echo and more warmth in the low end, just as when a sound is right next to a microphone.
• Tone goes from dark and soft to crisp and bright. People differ here: some find the sharp, sparkly sounds the most tingly, others prefer them muffled.
• Movement: Still keeps each sound in its own place. Drifting lets them wander slowly. Ear to ear swaps each sound between your left and right ear with every new gesture, and Around your head circles them around you.
• Listening on: Headphones (3D) uses the same 3D sound technique as virtual-reality games, so sounds seem to come from outside your head, even from behind. On speakers it can sound odd, so choose Speakers for plain left-to-right stereo.
• Let the levels wander slowly fades each sound in and out on its own, so the mix keeps changing.
• Sleep timer gently fades everything out over the last few minutes, then stops.

How it makes the sounds

There are no recordings inside. Every sound is built from scratch with the Web Audio API in your browser. A tap is a tiny burst of noise followed by the ring of a small wooden or glass body. Crinkling is hundreds of tiny clicks at constantly shifting pitches, bunched together the way a crumpling sheet gives way. The whisper is breathy noise shaped by three moving filters, which mimic the way your mouth shapes vowels. Chance decides the details of every gesture (how many taps, how hard, how long a stroke, and which of several takes of each sound), so the pattern never repeats the way a looped recording does.

Ideas for using it

• Winding down at bedtime: Slow & sleepy with the sleep timer.
• Background sound while you study or work: No-talking study or Library, with the closeness turned down.
• Finding your triggers: press Surprise me a few times and note which sounds you like, then build your own mix around them.
• Sound for a video, stream or meditation track: press Record, let it play, then press it again to download what you heard.

Frequently asked questions