Consumption sounds: Vicarious listening in mukbang

This study examines mukbang as a case of consumer culture in which eating is organised for listening. Mukbang videos do more than display food. They stage ingestion as a mediated sensory event in which the sound of eating is recorded closely, sequenced over time and framed by platform conventions. Building on calls for a sonic turn in consumer research, the article develops vicarious listening to describe a mediated relation in which another person’s consumption can be encountered through sound. The concept names the sonic conditions through which a sense of eating with another person becomes plausible, while appetite effects and other audience responses remain beyond the article’s empirical claim. The article analyses a purposive corpus of publicly available mukbang clips through repeated close listening to the original audiovisual videos, supported by time-coded notes and a six-element listening lens. The clips’ visual and platform context remains part of the analysis, so eating sounds are interpreted in relation to food, mouths, microphones, titles, tags and address. The analysis shows how close recording, pacing, continuity, resets, texture and address shape ingestion into an unfolding event: bites begin moments, chewing sustains them, swallows close them, and pauses or breaths prepare their return. The article argues that mukbang is a consumer-cultural format in which bodily consumption becomes a repeatable source of mediated accompaniment. More broadly, it shows how consumer culture is organised through sonic arrangements as well as images and interaction, and how platforms transform ordinary bodily acoustics into intimate, shareable sensory relations.