Food sounds better
When patrons of The Fat Duck in the UK, one of the most innovative restaurants in the world, ordered seafood, they were brought ipods playing ‘sounds of the sea’ to accompany the dish. They reported that the food tasted fresher. The mixing up of sensory information, such as seeing colours or patterns when you hear music, or tasting words, are examples of a condition called synaesthesia. It affects as many as one in 2000 people. Studies have shown that we all have a potential for synaesthesia as newborns. The sensory pathways usually become normal as we grow, but there remains a trace of this capacity.

Bittersweet project explained
A recent project, led by Anne-Sylvie Crisinel, as part of the Cross Modal Research Laboratory, directed by Professor Charles Spence, at the University of Oxford found certain musical tones changed how we perceived certain tastes. Their Bittersweet Study showed that the taste of food could be adjusted by changing the sonic properties of a background soundtrack. For example, low brass sounds make things taste more bitter. High-pitched tunes played on a piano or bells make things taste sweeter.

Spence describes how subjects were given several pieces of bittersweet toffee. They were asked to rate each piece saying how sweet or bitter it was. Sometimes when they are eating a piece of toffee they heard a ‘bitter’ soundscape. Other times they heard the ‘sweet’ soundscape. He says, ‘people rated toffee as tasting significantly sweeter when listening to higher pitched soundscape, and as significantly more bitter when listening to the lower pitch soundscape.’

Synaesthetic future
They are currently working on making a musical recipe for each of the basic tastes: sweet, sour, salty and bitter and not just the pitch and type of instrument, but other sonic qualities such as rhythm. The Lab’s other projects include prototyping sonic plates and glasses, which make a synaesthetic sound to match the taste and smell of what is consumed. He continues, ‘we are also taking complex flavours and aromas like cognac or wine and trying to match instruments and sounds to them, to recombine those musical elements into a symphony.’

Spence believes that Bittersweet’s synaesthetic mapping is part of valuable approach to understanding multisensory inputs and part of a growing trend towards what he sees as synaesthetic marketing strategies to target consumers.