Infrasonge — from ASMR to contemplative soundscapes

Originally published on asmryouready.com in march 2016 by diego garro, this interview sat lost in the depths of the internet for years. It is reposted here for archival and cultural purposes.

Almost forgotten gems occasionally surface within the vast landscape of asmr creators. Among them is film composer and sonic artist jonathan fitas, whose project infrasonge sits deliberately at the fringes of the genre. The youtube channel never chased virality — most videos gathered only a few hundred views — but those who listened found something intimate and meticulously crafted.

Though built on asmr’s codes of immersion and attentive listening, infrasonge pushes the format into something deeper: sound as atmosphere, as architecture, as contemplative space. Each video pairs a slow, smoke-like visual with layers of recorded sound — never pure synthesis — shaped into spacious compositions.

Listeners describe it not as sounds coming toward them, but as being inside the sounds themselves.

Paintings made with sound: fuzzy bass textures, delicate crackles, distant waves and microscopic details recorded extremely close to the microphone. What follows is the full conversation, as it first appeared.

Q: How did you first encounter asmr — both as a personal experience and as online content?

My first asmr experience goes back to childhood — moments I don’t fully remember, like my father teaching me math; his dedication and passion did the trick. Online, I’ve never felt strong tingles, but I found the videos soothing and captivating. What I love is the immersion — not only through binaural technique but through duration. Asmr videos take their time, and that is amazing to me. It led me to research asmr during my master’s, and finally to experiment with it through infrasonge.

Q: How do you relate to the asmr creator community?

The community is wide and open to experimentation — that is why I started. It is a welcoming space, willing to listen and discover new things. The keyword for this project is experimentation, without creative restraint, bringing in what I learned from sound design and audio mixing as a film composer.

Q: Did you consciously adopt asmr-type materials?

Not really. I focus on sounds that please my ear; I don’t ask whether something is an “asmr kind of sound.” asmr is about listening and transmission more than specific materials. Some sounds became iconic thanks to certain creators, but as experience shows, any sound — quiet or loud, high or low — can trigger it.

Q: What role does the microphone play in your creative process?

A leading one. I record something every day. Almost everything I use is captured with microphones; I use very few electronic sources, and even sounds that seem synthetic usually began as recordings. I love that recordings carry an unpredictability and liveliness hard to replicate with modern synths — and I’m a sound geek, I just love manipulating them.

Q: Your compositions are spatially rich. How do you build ambience, location and movement?

It depends on the material. I record mostly close-proximity, because I don’t like my studio’s room acoustics; I strip the ambience and add artificial reverb later to play with distance. For movement I use binaural and surround processors, which open endless narrative possibilities for spatial design.

Q: What artistic or technical influences can be heard in infrasonge?

I try not to work with references in mind — my other projects already demand that — but I keep returning to jon hopkins, and luc ferrari’s presque rien n°2 isn’t far either. As a listener I’m hugely impressed by dmitri of massageasmr; he built an entire studio for asmr videos, and his craftsmanship is what encouraged me to experiment within the genre.

Q: What is your creative approach? Do you follow a plan?

Usually it begins with the urge to record and play. I don’t start a piece until a few sounds catch my ear — it is like getting new toys, I just play with them for hours. Then I build in layers and distances: some sounds almost touching the ear, others far away, giving the sound a stage to travel across.

The clues are in the titles. For #5 rainfall I had worked two ideas for weeks — a rain texture and a piano — without knowing where they would go, then combined them and wrote the space between the two. It is all trying, re-trying, doing, undoing and doing again until the structure feels right.