NWT 13-year-old amasses legion of fans with sound

A 13-year-old has amassed more followers on YouTube than there are people in the Northwest Territories – with sounds designed to make you tingle.

NWT resident Kache Daniels started her channel, Honey Tingles, a year ago. At the time of writing, she has more than 53,000 subscribers.

Daniels’ channel is devoted to ASMR – autonomous sensory meridian response – which is often described as a tingling sensation along your spine, triggered by sound.

Some people can’t stand ASMR videos and some people aren’t affected, but fans say they help relaxation.

More: What is ASMR?

For Daniels, her channel – billed as “Inuvialuit/Indigenous ASMR extraordinaire” – also offers an outlet to spread love and positivity. A video in which she repeatedly tells people they are amazing helped garner tens of thousands of subscribers for her channel.

“I have a lot of viewers who struggle with mental illnesses like depression or insomnia, or just family struggles,” she told Cabin Radio. “They were telling me that in the comments, so I decided to launch that video and a lot of people seemed to like that.”

She said it can be overwhelming to know so many people are following her and watching her videos – but, by now, it also feels normal.

“I’m just so grateful for every person who watches and subscribes to me,” she said.

Her most-watched video – which had more than half a million views at the time of writing – is of her eating a cake to celebrate 30,000 followers.

“I almost burnt my house down in the video with sparklers,” she said. “It was a bit funny, because my face is my terrified face.”

The channel’s videos show Daniels, occasionally joined by friends, using everybody objects to create a series of sounds.

For example, recent videos feature the opening and closing of lids on household items; Daniels chewing fries from McDonald’s into a microphone; and a video of Daniels speaking French (“amazing tingles but not that good French haha,” the title reads).

Daniels said she considers the visual component of the videos to be part of the ASMR experience. Of the 30 videos she has posted in the past month, just two have fewer than 20,000 views.

She began thinking about a channel years ago, when she saw her first ASMR video while scrolling through her recommendations on YouTube.

“So I clicked on it,” she recalled. “And of course, my first reaction was, ‘Oh, this is kind of strange. What is this? Why is someone tapping for a whole video?’”

The video intrigued her and she decided to do some research.

“A few months later, I just started trying it out for myself and I was hooked.”

She’s been posting videos since last August, but initially deleted a few when she started to get bullied. She decided to come back to the channel and ignore the negativity, which she said accounts for about 15 percent of the comments.

“If you don’t give negative energy attention, then it loses its power,” said Daniels, who has gained 40,000 subscribers since passing the 10,000 mark in May.

“You just have to ignore it and focus on more of the positive than the negative.”