From cookbooks to ASMR: significance of sound and hearing in culinary recipes

Abstract

Based on the contrastive analysis of selected recipes represented in various media, such as cookbooks, television culinary shows and ASMR videos, this article seeks to provide an overview of numerous roles, ranging from informative through performative to artistic-aesthetic, which sound plays in contexts of transmitting culinary knowledge and depicting culinary skills. In line with the findings of sound studies, phenomenology, and postphenomenology, the authors aim to present both the material dimension of sound, mainly brought to existence by the techniques and technologies used and its aesthetic-artistic dimension actualized in a performative act. In this article, it has been demonstrated, following Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s and Melissa Van Drie’s observations, that sensory experiences in culinary contexts are always intertwined, and “listening, like cooking, is multisensorial.” While this research draws primarily on the concepts developed within the field of sound studies, it is interdisciplinary in nature and can be situated within the academic fields of culinary history and food studies, history of everyday life, and philosophy of technology.