Wilful Chromesthesia: Sounds and Memories in the Depths of YouTube

Words: Mahika Dhar

The first night I slept to "dark peach" noise, I dreamt of mushrooms so small and numerous that they created a fungus film over the garden like grass flowers. "Dark peach" evoked forests, pixie-witch hybrids and moss – and, of course, miniature mushrooms. The next night, I slept to "healing menthol noise" and dreamt of a library so dusty that I couldn't identify a single book.

Sensorial hyper-specificity is on the rise. Niche perfumes dominated the post-COVID zeitgeist, and now, niche sounds are growing in popularity. Across YouTube, Spotify, and targeted mindfulness apps, sound mixers are building two kinds of auditory landscapes. In some, the ambience is clearly defined and immersive, like Lorelai Gilmore's sundrenched and unrealistically expensive house, or a 90s gaming room whose sights and sounds are lost to the annals of time. 

But then there's the other, weirder kind: sound imagery used to evoke a vivid scene of wilful chromesthesia — the rare sound and colour connection — to draw a link between the tartness of berries and a power nap or the heaviness of vanilla and deep slumber. "Mind-numbing indigo," "chamomile waves," "wild apricot," and "black hole noise" are a small sample of its sensorial offerings. "Chamomile waves", despite its name, sounds like any other kind of white noise, and when I closed my eyes and fell asleep to it, I could almost taste the staleness of a long-haul aeroplane. Yet the sound mixer Sound Sleep ASMR noted that they used "the sounds of chamomile leaves rustling and tea being gently stirred" and stretched the noises to "resemble something entirely new."

The tags used for these videos seem to be as vivid and meaningless as fragrance notes; the “sounds” of elderberries and valerian root are so distant from daily life that they are almost mythical, which is partly the point: to create a fantasy that borders on soothing nonsense, like the Symphony Dolphin meme.
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When I spoke to Dante Fumo, a sound mixer for film and animation, he mentioned that when reading, sleeping, or relaxing, for example, people gravitate toward ambient sounds “that put them in a certain frame of mind – usually calmness but sometimes a particular type of nostalgia or romance or fantasy." Yet at the same time, he notes that listeners still want "complexity". To satisfy the complexity, a variety of textures and natural elements – like the previously mentioned chamomile, velvet, and dark peach – make the most sense as they "are mostly steady and predictable yet always subtly changing because they involve a high degree of randomness." 

Instead of a white noise machine, which is often repetitive and harsh, listeners can find a more meaningful, nuanced, and immersive experience in hyper-specific sounds. In a time of sensory overload – Subway Surfers speedruns overlaid with sand-cutting videos – it makes sense that we're gravitating toward sensory specificity. It's almost as if the clutter of digital sounds, colours, and opinions led us to yearn for something fantastic and individual, like the sound of "aqua-lavender" or the smell of the o-zone layer.

Colour-coded noise has been around for decades. Brown noise is traditionally fuzzy and environmental, meant to aid focus, while black noise – deep and spacious – is ideal for restful sleep. Originally, the colours were merely a guide for sound mixers to duplicate "a sound that has a specific frequency pattern" and had no relation to actual colours, moods, or feelings. These sounds formed the building block for creative sound mixers to branch across moods, times, and realities. Kester Spach, the creator of the "90s computer room" ambience – which now boasts over 100,000 views – begins building his sound landscapes with a "feeling". When I interviewed him on his thematic process – what is "Windows nostalgia-core"? – he stressed that "the specificity of aesthetics like whimisgoth or frutiger aero can tap into something inside you that you didn't even know was there or memories you had forgotten." In doing so, the sounds become "ephemeral", and the long lost memories turn tangible. To create this world, Spach thought of an "old desktop with Windows 95" he inherited from his grandfather. 

"I remember staying up late at night playing games with the most basic graphics – but for me, the experience was magic." To replicate this, he compiled specific era-appropriate music, added a layer of whirring noise reminiscent of bulky desktops, and included a thin layer of crickets chirping, all to form the feeling of being a kid spending too much time online at night, back in the 90s. And Spach was successful: "One commenter on '90s movie childhood' said they started crying five seconds into the video – as if it had triggered the release of an emotion buried somewhere deep inside."

It's as though we're creating a detailed guide for an encounter with aliens; we can show them a forest, but we can also make them listen to it, eat it, and smell it. If the alien were to ask what it feels like to fall asleep to Twin Peaks, we could make them listen to "Relaxing Velvet Waves," a twelve-hour video made using a "variety of coloured velvets (crushed, panne, and devoré)" and "undulating wave crescendos in the opposite ear." If they wanted to know the joy of playing on Polly Pocket's website as a child in the early aughts, I would play "strawberries and cream" overlaid with a "2000s computer room ambience". And more often than not, it seems like the aliens are us, and the sounds are merely keys to access parts of ourselves we can't seem to find on our own. I will never again play a Lara Croft video game on a computer that slowly processes pixels while my sister nags me for her turn, but I can lie down, close my eyes, and let someone fiddle with binaural sounds until I can almost feel the cool plastic of an old desktop.