About a year ago, gross as it is, I noticed I actually kind of enjoyed the sound of one of my coworkers chewing with their mouth open. Then somebody came in with a big mechanical keyboard several months later and started clonking away, and I enjoyed that, too. The unevenness of the clicks and clacks make little patters and pops in my head that are like tiny little itch bubbles that are scratchpopped the same moment they blip into existence.
These are sounds I used to find extremely annoying and I don't know why it changed. But when I started looking up mechanical keyboard sounds on youtube so that I could listen to them at home, I came across these ASMR videos and discovered that apparently, it's a thing.
For me, in-person sounds are always more satisfying. They are less predictable and less uniform. The videos some people try to make to capture the ASMR feeling have the idea right, but are not uneven enough. It's like when you ask someone to write 50 iterations of a coin flip and they end up having max substrings of the same character in a row that are only 2 characters long. Real randomness isn't like that - you'll have some 4's and 5's, and 1's with wide padding.
I think if you don't already feel this phenomenon yourself, watching some ASMR videos to discover what it's like will probably not give you the feeling. It's like eating a food you always hated, or jazz music - you don't like it until suddenly, one day sitting there, you realize that you probably would if you tried it again. And then you go, and you do. Before that, you don't really get the appeal. It's just the fermentation of the brain. After a certain amount of time, it just has a different taste.
For me, in these whisper videos, it's not the soft voice that triggers the feeling, but the clicks in the speech - the "sk" and "st" sounds, and simple pops of the tongue while it's being rearranged in the mouth between words. Those noises made by the water in the mouth and not the air.
Just thought I'd share.