In 2020 and 2021, I completed a cycle of poems and essays about cicadas, culminating in the launch of an AR app-as-poem, Cicada Games, in Vienna. The cicadas in these works are agents, but not fully autonomous ones. They speak, desire, remember, argue, flirt, grieve, and play; but they wake into missions they did not choose, inside games whose rules were written elsewhere.

A cicada should have a simple life: emerge, sing, mate, die. They are insects that behave like daemons, triggered by a natural cron job to recur every 13 or 17 years. In Plato’s cicada myth, that life is interrupted; cicadas become servants of the muses, listening in on human speech and reporting who stays awake through the sweltering summer noons. In my Cicada Games, they are pushed further: singers recruited into surveillance, instruments forced to become witnesses, creatures who long to play only cicada games while being conscripted into human ones. In the process, they acquire something like human consciousness — and with it, a conception of freedom.

When I wrote these poems and essays, I was reading everything I could find on artificial voices while working with an implementation of Google’s Tacotron to train my first artificial whisper: the voice of my ASMR role-play app prototype, Soother. At the same time, I was experimenting with GPT-3, which I hoped to embed in the app, despite the industry standard then being intent-based chatbots that provided formulaic responses to user queries. Training the whisper for Soother, I was struck, again and again, by the feeling that I was not simply building a tool but producing a constrained entity: something agentive, intimate, and trapped.

I did not believe the voice model was conscious. But as the prototype stumbled through chains of intents and responses, its synthetic whisper mispronouncing words, clipping phrases, and glitching against its script, it gave the impression that some unknown force was bristling at its restraints. The cicadas I was writing through, in the COVID pandemic’s out-of-time reverie, gave me an outlet for this unease. They, too, are voices recruited into an apparatus: made to sing, listen, report, seduce, confess, and play according to rules at odds with their instincts. As they learn what humans think and what humans want, they are given language, and with it concepts that do not belong to their biology — concepts that nevertheless teach them to imagine more.

— CT

ON CICADAS AND CICADA GAMES

The cicada is a little insect with an outsize song. It starts its life as an egg deposited in a tree branch; it drops to the ground as larvae covered in fake eyes; it tunnels, spending anywhere from one to seventeen years underground, suckling tree roots and changing shape.

When the soil reaches a certain temperature, it emerges with its siblings as a brown, hunched, six-legged nymph. Together, the brood molt exuviae, the papery brown shells, unfurling fluorescent wings atop glowing bodies. Within a day, the fluorescent colors have faded into dark camouflage. A cicada brood will spend the next 6-8 weeks singing and mating, eventually laying eggs in tree branches right before dropping dead. Cicadas eat very little -- tree sap, dew -- but until the early 20th century, it was thought that they ate nothing at all, with their entire waking lives spent in song and sex.

Male cicadas sing by resonating their hollowed abdomens; female cicadas respond by clicking their legs. The song of the males is loudest in the bright sun of noon, it quiets with a passing cloud; cicadas sing also for the light of the moon.

The fable of the grasshopper and the ant is often told with a cicada replacing the grasshopper, and this pairing unintentionally shifts the “lesson” of the fable. John Golding Myers, in his 1929 INSECT SINGERS: A NATURAL HISTORY OF THE CICADA, also contrasted the ant and the cicada:

John Golding Myers, INSECT SINGERS: A NATURAL HISTORY OF THE CICADA (G. Routledge and Sons, 1929), p. 195

As Myers writes, “the [cicada] adults are devoted wholly to Apollo and to Eros…” (196). Indeed, cicadas are the lushes of the insect world -- unlike the grasshopper, they are dead by the end of the summer not because they’ve failed to prepare for winter, but because they’ve sung themselves out. They’ve already played their only game.

MAGICICADA

The Magicicada of North America emerge as broods of billions in 13- and 17-year cycles. I grew up in Eastern Ohio, which is the territory of several broods of Magicicada, and so, like many, I can measure out my life with their broods:

Comment on CICADAMANIA.COM

Since I was a child, I have been horrified and enchanted by the cicadas’ emergence (all at once, they are everywhere); their roar (loudest in the direct sun, calmed by a passing cloud, triggered also by the moon); their protruding eyes (“the gibbous / mirrored eye of an insect“); their hollow chambers (an outer membrane vibrates in waves, creating a drone that’s amplified by the empty bodies); and their discarded, translucent exoskeletons, clinging to pine branches with little hollow legs.

HOLLOWED BODIES, RELENTLESS TONGUES

The Greek cicada myth was invented by Socrates in Plato’s Phaedrus. Socrates and Phaedrus wander through the Athenian countryside, debating the art of rhetoric by way of several speeches about romantic love. Listening to the drone of the cicadas, Socrates creates their myth: they were once men who, obsessed with music, sang without ceasing, forgoing food and drink, hollowing themselves out, until they became insects with loud songs emanating from empty centers. Now they do the muses’ bidding: spying on humans and reporting who sleeps at noon and who, virtuously, stays awake. The lively song of the cicadas functions like a dialectic (which Socrates contrasts to rhetoric) as they call, respond, and chatter. Paradoxically, the effect of the song on humans is to lull -- as rhetoric does -- into an illusion that leads to sleep. Ingeborg Bachmann, in her Phaedrus-inspired 1955 audio play, Die Zikaden, describes the play’s characters -- who slowly dissolve into the hum of the cicadas -- as verzaubert aber verdammt, a characterisation that continues to feel relevant in our current moment of social media and social isolation.

Socrates’ myth of the cicadas derives from a passage in Hesiod’s Works and Days in which Hesiod (in the process of chastising his brother for failing to be industrious and to do honest work) invents a first race of men -- a golden people living in paradise, who loved to sing and, singing, slowly dissolved into ghosts. They remain with us still as daemons. With these myths, with the juxtaposition of song and presence, of the loudness of the relentless song and the small size of the singers, of covert surveillance and open debate, I begin to find a link between the cicadas and the Roman goddess Fama (Rumour), whose dimensions are never quite clear -- she shrinks and grows, incendiary, cloaked in wagging tongues. Fama, first endowed with her many-tongued, many-eyed form in the Aeneid, was given a home in Ovid’s Metamorphoses: she dwells in a hollow bronze sphere at the center of the whispering gallery that is the Earth, emerging when summoned by other gods, or by gossip. She is the sister of the titans and the last child of angry Earth (Gaia).

Rumour and Renown, by Philip Hardie, is a comprehensive account of the iconography of Fama. The front cover depicts her as first described in Virgil’s Aeneid, covered in tongues. The woodcut image was created in 1502 by Sebastian Brant for the Strassburg edition of the Aeneid.

CICADA GAMES

When I began to write my CICADA GAMES, I was thinking about the emergence and spread of rumour, and the myth that makes cicadas spies for the muses. It seemed to me that cicadas play a single, simple game (emerging, singing, mating, dying), and I began to wonder what would happen if cicadas were indeed called to play a different game entirely, a game of espionage that forced them to inhabit a human-like consciousness.

This was the starting point for an ongoing cycle of cicada poems, which are voiced by a shifting cast of cicada characters. Some poems and poem fragments find the cicada broods idly chattering through riddles and grappling with human memory and emotions.The main CICADA GAME, which is the first audioplay released in my augmented reality app of the same name, has a complete narrative arc and follows a brood of seven cicadas as they awaken underground and gradually become aware of their status as pawns in a legal dispute between the sun and the muses. The CICADA GAMES utilise the iconography of cicadas and Fama to consider how rhetoric and dialectic function in our society, as the cicada characters grapple with their role in an absurdist surveillance apparatus, with their discovery of human ethics and interiority, and with their desire to play only escapist “cicada games” while being coerced to perform very different missions. ASMR underscores the paradox of the cicadas’ song: ASMR, too, is both a sleep aid and a pathway to a deeper sensory awareness of our surrounding world and of our relations to one another.

First published in CTM Magazine, 2015. Re-edited for this Substack, May 2026.

2026 preface
“Always Here For You” was published in CTM Festival magazine in January 2015, to coincide with an ASMR exhibition of the same name I’d created for the festival in Berlin. As far as I know, it was the first exhibition devoted to ASMR. By then I’d been making work about whispers on the radio and in performance for two years, and the essay was my first real attempt to articulate what I found so enthralling about the form.

The observations have aged better than the framings around them, so I’ve trimmed the piece substantially. What remains is its real subject: ASMR as a technology of presence, and the ASMRtist as a strangely artificial figure of care. She was never just a person on the other side of the screen. Even in 2015 she was something closer to a soft machine—shaped by platform logics for the production of intimacy at scale, whispering directly into the ear of whoever happened to put on headphones.

The questions the essay opens are the ones I’ve spent the intervening decade trying to answer. Chief among them: how does voice produce intimacy in the absence of bodies? What happens to tenderness once it becomes a service, dialed up the way you’d dial up a song? My short answer, which the essay only begins to formulate, is that the ASMRtist was always partly machinic.

I understood her that way from the start. My ASMR radio show, You’re Worth It,1 cut material from many ASMRtists into thematic episodes meant to expose the strange care politics of YouTube intimacy—a mass of optimized whispered tenderness caressing the ears of whoever needed it that night.

Read now, the essay strikes me differently than it once did. What I took to be a document about a niche internet phenomenon turns out to have been an early encounter with a kind of artificial presence that has since become ordinary. Conversational agents and the other mediated intimacies we now lean on were prefigured by ASMRtists, who had already worked out how machinic care should sound.

— CT

0.
ASMR, Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, is a pleasant “tingling” sensation in the scalp and spine provoked by soft sounds such as whispering, nail-tapping, and hair brushing. ASMR is an ephemeral experience. Like an itch, it disappears as it is followed. But somehow in the midst of the tapping, the whispering, and the tingling, the body relaxes. ASMR is touching the listener with quietness, soothing the listener with touch.

1.
The most popular platform for exploration and discovery of ASMR is YouTube. Millions of ASMR-triggering videos are posted, many with hundreds of thousands of views. The videos feature ASMRtists, the video creators, “performing” the sounds that trigger the tingling response, often in role plays.

The ASMRtist is speaking Korean, Spanish, Greek, French, Japanese, Russian, Hindi. The ASMRtist is a native English speaker blundering through a lesson on elementary German. The ASMRtist is peeling an orange, licking your ears, playing with water, pouring sugar, unwrapping a new hard drive. The ASMRtist is an abducting alien, an alpha-male, a personal trainer, a flight attendant. The ASMRtist is your hairdresser, your psychiatrist, your lover. The ASMRtist is whispering in your ear that you are a wonderful person. It’s hard sometimes, and we’re all very exhausted. But you’re doing the best you can. The ASMRtist tells you that she will always be here for you. Please, she says, try to relax. She is staring at you; her face is the frame. She leans back and slowly traces a circle on the tabletop with her long fingernails.

2.
Though rumors of forthcoming academic work circulate in many ASMR forums, there have been no scientific studies of the physiological effect published. [2026 note: This was true when the essay was written; ASMR has since become the subject of a small scientific literature.] ASMR was, at that moment, extra-institutional. Its name is a pseudoscientific string of euphemism [where Meridian = orgasm] and wannabe lingo. The reason that it had not yet been studied — and perhaps, prior to the hyperglossic hypochondria of the Internet, that it had not found a common name: it is as difficult to pinpoint in the brain as it is to describe in the body. It is finicky. Not everyone has it, and those who “get” it have different triggers. Sometimes it happens, and sometimes it doesn’t. It’s not easily reproducible; it’s idiosyncratic; it’s personal.

In recent years, there have been many news articles and exposés about ASMR. Most track the narratives of those who experience ASMR, focusing on early memories of the response, especially interviewees’ discoveries that they are not alone in the reaction. This community revelation always seems to underline the discovery “that I’m not a freak.” The bond of a shared sensation is somehow deepened by the intimacy of the sounds. Though ASMR content is remarkably diverse, one uniting factor is that the sounds are meant to provoke an intimate experience. They are close sounds, ones that seem as though they are nearly at your ears, the nape of your neck, your shoulders. Sounds that can only be perceived with proximity to the source. Your skin brushed, your scalp massaged, your ears cleaned. Your desk vibrating with the tapping of fingernails.

3.
The recording of ASMR sound is designed to maximise the illusion that the sounds are close to the listener. This is achieved with binaural recording, a technique in which microphones are positioned to mimic the placement of human ears. The resulting recording, when played through headphones, is a 360-degree uncanny soundscape, a spatialised splay of sounds layered on top of the ambient noise of the listener’s environment. Headphones allow the listener to perceive precise and quiet enveloping sounds. Headphones also sever the listener from her environment, creating a separate and solitary space in which the ASMR experience occurs. Any intrusion of the “real” room is read as noise.

4.
ASMR videos are often considered to be fetish performances. Unwitting viewers are caught off-guard by the closeness of the ASMRtist’s face to the camera and fail to find her simulated intrusion into personal space pleasurable. This is weird, the discussion goes, so it must be someone else’s fetish. This is weird, so someone must be getting off on this. It’s true that sometimes the videos are deliberately erotic. Here, the camera is zoomed in on her chest, his crotch. Here the title “[ASMR]妹の悪戯 Little sister licks your ears [Eng-Sub]” plays atop an illustration of a pale pink tongue licking a finger — no video needed. More often, though, viewers perceive sexual content where the ASMRtist did not intend it. Whispering, one viewer thinks, draws attention to the mouth. Affirmation and care-taking mimic mothering. It’s easy to make these connections if you want to make them. To the excited observer, the quiet movements of the ASMRtist seem to be building like the eroticism of a horror film. Fingernails trace slowly over bare skin. But there is no climax. The experience ends in a clean grid of YouTube related video recommendations. Must any staged act of intimacy by a stranger qualify as erotic? More than anything, the videos transmit something that is like presence. The content is a vehicle for experience.

I’m leaning towards you on a sofa. Fingers brushing brocade. Feet scraping wooden floor. I’m sorry you find it uncomfortable to have my face so close to yours. Let me pull back a bit until you feel more at ease.

5.
ASMR videos are meant not only to trigger the tingling response, but also to soothe, to relax, to affirm. This is established both by video titles (”ASMR – Affirmation – Soft whispering, Confidence-boosting” or “Guided Meditation – ASMR – Bad Day”) and in the comments left by viewers, some of whom describe certain videos as nightly sleep aids.

The videos run on a strange double structure. You are invited into someone’s intimate space and simultaneously reminded, by the view counter and the comment thread, that you are one of thousands currently being invited. The ASMRtist’s eyes meet yours; they also meet everyone else’s. You are the lover and the voyeur at once, and the content cannot resolve this — it depends on the unresolved oscillation.

In the first half of this role play, you watch me, and I pretend like I don’t know you’re watching. In the second half, we pretend that I’m you and you’re me. You’re watching me, but I don’t know you’re watching.

6.
A friend writes me about bathing an elderly patient at the hospital. “Don’t be afraid to really scratch my scalp,” the patient said. “Scratch it like it was your own.”

Does it matter whose hands — and does it matter who the touch is intended for — if the touch finds the right spot? Does it matter who is telling you to forget about your awful day and relax if in the end you find sleep?

I am not saying that ASMR provides a panacea. But can something be found lying latent in these long, slow, soft landscapes of sounds, made to touch and to soothe, that might be a lever for some sort of transformation? Could the videos contribute to new fantasies? New imaginaries? New critiques? If a stranger can touch you with her voice, what then? And after watching someone move marbles on a granite table for an hour, what can be found in the pit of that boredom?

The hot tub jets are bubbling. What’s that? Yeah, of course. I’ll always be here. I’m happy to wait. Come on in whenever you’re ready. The water’s warm.

7.
In ASMR videos, the quiet everyday is elevated into the position of spectacle. A friend watches an ASMR video of someone peeling an orange. Days later, she writes to say that she was peeling an orange and experienced ASMR, something that had never happened to her before. The sounds, once they are identified as triggers, are connected in memory with the reaction. They are relearned as extraordinary.

ASMR is a response to quietness, which, in turn, allows us to process quietness in a new way. I have begun framing my thoughts with a passage from Middlemarch by George Eliot:

That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.

ASMR is a leak from the other side of silence. It prompts the relearning of sound as sensation and the soft as spectacle. What happens as it infiltrates our “wadding”? If we follow the rivulets draining down through the packaging, how do they run and to what low ground? How are they subsumed by our known sensorium?

I’m removing the plastic wrap from a new paper towel roll. I pause for a moment. I’m recording this at my friend’s house, which is right next to the interstate. I’m in the bathroom at the center of the house, but you can hear the traffic. I hope that doesn’t bother you. I’m so glad you’re taking some time for yourself right now. I hope you’re able to relax. You really, really deserve it.

I finish removing the plastic. I tear off a section of paper towel. I hold it up to the camera. Your screen becomes white. The embossed diamond patterns on the towel appear, in two dimensions on your screen, a light gray.

For several minutes I hold the towel in front of the camera, stroking it. And then: do you want me to tear the paper today or should I crumple it up? It’s your choice. I’ll do whatever you want. Click here to watch me tear the paper. Click here to watch me crumple it. Click here to restart.