Music from the kitchen

Abstract

A growing body of scientific research has recently started to demonstrate how both music and soundscapes can influence people's perception of the taste, flavour, and mouthfeel of food and drink. However, to date, far less research has investigated the question of whether the music that happens to be playing in the background might also influence the way in which chefs, home cooks, and others making food (or, for that matter, mixing drinks) develop or season their creations. One of the aims of this review is to highlight the markedly different views currently held by chefs concerning the appropriateness of music in their kitchens (and the different roles that it might play). Next, the evidence that has been published to date suggesting that the music people listen to can change the particular taste/flavour profiles that they create is reviewed. A number of putative explanations for the crossmodal effects of music on taste are evaluated, including the suppressive effect of loud noise on certain aspects of taste perception, priming through crossmodal correspondences, and/or the influence of any music-induced changes in mood on taste/flavour perception. Given that what we hear influences what we taste, and hence, how the person in the kitchen likely creates/seasons the dish, some commentators have been tempted to wonder whether the same music should perhaps also be played in the spaces (e.g., the restaurant or home dining room) where that food will be consumed in order to equate the conditions in which the dish or drink is seasoned/created with the environment in which it is tasted. This opinion piece ends by stressing the limitations with such an approach. One of the main problems being the kinds of music that the majority of chefs apparently prefer to listen to while working in the kitchen, music which is often chosen to motivate the staff who will likely be working a long shift.

Wine and music (II): can you taste the music? Modulating the experience of wine through music and sound

“…In most, if not all, of the studies that have been reviewed here, the fact that the music was relevant to the wine tasting experience was made apparent to the participants/tasters. It must remain an open question, therefore, as to whether for any music that just so happens to be playing incidentally, similar crossmodal effects would be observed or whether instead these kinds of effects require the taster to actively link their tasting experience with what they are hearing ( [81]; see also [82,83], on the automaticity of crossmodal correspondences).…”

Wine and music (III): so what if music influences the taste of the wine?

“…For over half a century now, scientists have been interested in the question of whether what we hear influences what we taste (see [1,2] for early work; and [3,4] for recent reviews). A large body of evidence shows that the sounds made by many foods as we eat them can influence the tasting experience (see [5], for a review).…”

“…Related here are concerns about experimenter expectancy effects. 4 The worry is that people might respond in a certain way, not because that is what they really perceive but rather because that is the way that they think they ought to respond, for whatever reason. 5 One such reason is related to the expectations that the experimenter may have concerning the outcome of the experiment that they are conducting.…”

“…3 Stafford et al [116] has found that alcohol strength can be impaired by distractor conditions involving listening to music while hearing and repeating news stories. 4 Concerns, in fact, that run throughout much of the field of experimental psychology (e.g., [63,64]), but which most psychologists conveniently seem to ignore (after all, making sure that all of one's experiments were conducted in a double (or even triple) blind manner, as in a clinical drugs trial, just seems like it is more trouble than it is worth). Who knows though whether it is all those null results, and all those failures to replicate, sitting in the psychologist's file drawers [117] somehow mitigate against experimenter expectancy effects being as much of a concern as some would have us believe!…”

Timing is everything: Onset timing moderates the crossmodal influence of background sound on taste perception.

“…In other words, if hearing a specific soundscape could prime a specific taste, this could lead people to adjust their actual product perception in order to conform to a heightened expected value (Lange et al, 2018). Expectation effects have been widely demonstrated in the food-related area when it comes to visual food cues (Spence et al, 2016;Verasteigui-Tena et al, 2017), linguistic descriptions TIMING IS EVERYTHING 5 (Piqueras-Fiszman & Spence, 2015;Spence, 2016), or even from the sound of opening of food/beverage packaging . In the context of sonic seasoning, then, hearing a specific soundtrack before tasting might well be expected to generate sensory expectations which would then go on to influence the actual tasting experience.…”