Want To Enhance The Flavor Of Your Food? Put On The Right Music
Here's an experiment: take a bite of whatever food you have nearby and listen to some music, something with high notes. Now, take another bite, but listen to something with low notes.
Notice anything?
Researchers at the University of Oxford have been looking for a link between sound and taste. They've found that higher-pitched music — think flutes — enhances the flavor of sweet or sour foods. Lower-pitched sounds, like tubas, enhance the bitter flavors.
Charles Spence is leading that study into what he and his team call "multi-sensory food perception." Spence tells NPR's Arun Rath how taste is the sense that unifies all of the others.
"Flavor is probably one of the most multi-sensory of our experiences ... because it does involve taste and more smell than we realize," Spence says. "But all of the senses come together to give us that one unified experience of flavor."
Texture is one of the more overt ways sound plays into taste, Spence says. Think of the crackling of chips or the fizzy sounds of a carbonated drink — sound plays a major role in our experience of those textures.
But the other place where sound affects taste, Spence says, is in the environment; imagine listening to the sounds of the sea while you're eating fish at a seaside restaurant.
Spence's team is currently working on what he calls "synesthetic sounds." By asking tasters to match flavors with sounds, they discovered the connection between high-pitched sounds and sweets and low-pitched sounds and bitter tastes.
"You can then start creating experiences where you play particular kinds of music or soundscape to diners or to drinkers while they're tasting," he says. "We're able to show that we can change the experience in [the] mouth by about 5 or 10 percent."
Another one of the projects Spence's team has worked on was something called "sonic seasoning." They'd take the results of taste tests involving a myriad of flavors to composers and sound designers, who'd then craft sound experiences to match those taste experiences.
"[For example,] a dark chocolate or coffee-tasting dessert, then something like Pavarotti's 'Nessun Dorma,' making much more low-pitched sounds, seem to be the perfect complement to help bring out those bitter tastes in the dark chocolate or the coffee," he says.
Of course, "Nessun Dorma" gets a little more high-pitched near the end — so there are still challenges in finding the perfect sound for a constant flavor experience.
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Transcript
ARUN RATH, HOST:
I'd like you to stop what you're doing and take a bite of food. Don't crash your car or anything. But right now, whatever you have handy, bite into something and start chewing.
(FLUTE MUSIC)
RATH: So does that taste any different now, maybe? How about now?
(TUBA MUSIC)
RATH: Researchers at the University of Oxford had been looking for a link between sound and taste. They found that higher-pitched music, like flutes, enhances the flavor of sweet or sour foods, while lower-pitched sounds, like tubas, enhance the bitter flavors. Charles Spence is leading that study. He joined us by Skype to explain his team's research into what they call multi-sensory food perception.
CHARLES SPENCE: I suppose flavor is probably one of the most multi-sensory of our experiences - or our everyday experiences - because it does involve taste and more smell than we realize. But all the senses come together to kind of give us that one unified experience of flavor.
RATH: So some of the things you've done in your research, the connections with taste, say, smell and even how things look, that makes a sort of intuitive sense. But I was really surprised to hear there was a link between taste and hearing.
SPENCE: That's right. Now, the (unintelligible) can be everything from kind of the crunch of your crisp or the crackle of your crackling, the - kind of the carbonation of your Cava. All of the things we think of as kind of the texture of foods are actually being experienced as much by the sounds we hear. What's even more surprising, I think, is that the sounds in the environment in which we eat and drink have an impact too. And that could be everything from, you know, listening to the sounds of the sea maybe enhancing the taste of the seafood that you might eat - foods that we're working on a lot at the moment and it's very exciting to us is it's kind of the synesthetic sound. So we find that when we give people sweet tastes to try or bitter tastes that they all normally match those tastes with different sounds, so sweet tastes seem to make people think more of high-pitched sounds. You know, the sound of piano, say...
(PIANO MUSIC)
SPENCE: ...whereas bitter-tasting foods tend to make people think of lower-pitched sounds or more like brassy instruments seem to kind of correspondent or go together with bitter tastes.
(MUSIC)
SPENCE: You can then start kind of creating experiences where you play particular kinds of music or soundscape to diners or to drinkers while they're tasting, and we're able to show that we could change the experience in mouth by about 5 or 10 percent.
RATH: I understand you worked with British Airways on something called Sonic Seasoning.
SPENCE: That's right. So we kind of first take participants, give them a whole range of tastes and flavors to try out. From there we kind of take the results to composers or to sound designers and turn them into kind of pleasant sounding things that you might want to listen to while eating or drinking.
RATH: Could you give us an example of one of those pairings?
SPENCE: A dark chocolate or a coffee-tasting dessert, then something like a Pavarotti "Nessun Dorma," with kind of much more low-pitched sounds seem to be the perfect complement to help bring out those kind of bitter tastes in the dark chocolate or in the coffee.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "NESSUN DORMA")
LUCIANO PAVAROTTI: (Singing in Italian).
RATH: But when he gets to the end of "Nessun Dorma" and goes up high, would that make the coffee taste worse?
SPENCE: (Laughter) So there are challenges, certainly. But if you find the right piece, you can find kind of the selection that will be fairly consistent, and so hopefully give it kind of a constant flavor.
RATH: Charles Spence leads a team at the University of Oxford investigating multi-sensory food perception. Professor Spence, thanks very much.
SPENCE: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "NESSUN DORMA")
PAVAROTTI: (Singing in Italian). Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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