Sweet music influences sensory and hedonic perception of food products with varying sugar levels

Inducing Novel Sound–Taste Correspondences via an Associative Learning Task

“…As mentioned earlier, studies explicitly investigating the underlying mechanisms of sound–taste correspondences are limited, and there does not seem to be any statistical regularity in the environment connecting the two features, with the exception of perhaps sounds produced by orofacial gestures when consuming pleasant or unpleasant foods (Knöferle & Spence, 2012). Although the findings of previous literature hint at some possible mechanisms of sound–taste correspondences overall (see Guedes et al., 2023), which may include an emotional mediation account, based on the pleasantness of different timbres (Crisinel & Spence, 2010a, 2012) or different levels of pitch (Wang et al., 2016), as well as a structural account (i.e., louder sounds are matched with more intense basic tastes; Wang et al., 2016) and a semantic account (i.e., the same words, such as sweet, may be used to describe taste and musical attributes; Guedes, Prada, Garrido, & Lamy, 2022). In the present paper, we focus on an emotional mediation account and on intermediate associations with color, as per the transitive property of crossmodal correspondences.…”

“…Furthermore, previous research has evidenced crossmodal interactions and crossmodal correspondences between basic tastes and different dimensions of sounds (Guedes, Vaz Garrido, Lamy, Pereira Cavalheiro, & Prada, 2023; Knöferle & Spence, 2012; Velasco, Corradi, & Motoki, 2023). Crossmodal correspondences refer to, often unexpected, associations most people tend to have between dimensions or stimuli in two different sensory modalities (Spence, 2011, 2022).…”

“…Crossmodal correspondences refer to, often unexpected, associations most people tend to have between dimensions or stimuli in two different sensory modalities (Spence, 2011, 2022). Correspondences between sound and tastes (as actual tastants and taste words) found in past literature have involved a variety of sound stimuli, including pure tones, musical tones, words, non‐words, speech sounds, music, and soundtracks (see Guedes et al., 2023, for a review), and the most prominent psychoacoustical parameter studied relates to pitch. Overall, the most consistent (but by no means perfect) correspondences found in this literature relate to associations between sweetness (and in some cases also sourness) and high‐pitch sounds and between bitterness and low‐pitch sounds (Crisinel & Spence, 2009, 2010a, 2010b; Knoeferle, Woods, Käppler, & Spence, 2015; Qi, Huang, Li, & Wan, 2020; Wang, Wang, & Spence, 2016; Q. J. Watson & Gunther, 2017).…”

“…Even though previous research has uncovered crossmodal correspondences between sounds and basic tastes using different types of both sound and basic taste stimuli, the mechanisms behind these associations are not well understood, although some explanations have been proposed (see Guedes et al., 2023). In general, literature explicitly studying the underlying mechanisms of crossmodal associations is scarce.…”

Progress in Multisensory Synergistic Salt Reduction

“…Hearing serves as a crucial element of the multisensory experience, uniquely regulating the perception of food [72]. It not only enriches our dining encounters but also influences our perception of salty taste through cross-modal interactions.…”