Can the taste of your food be influenced by the music you listen to while you eat?

Experimental psychologist Charles Spence thinks so. A new study from Spence and researchers at the Crossmodal Research Laboratory at the University of Oxford suggests a link between our experiences of sounds and flavours.

According to ‘The Sound (And Taste) Of Music,’ a blog post on Scientific American, “There may be implicit associations between taste and pitch. High pitched sounds are mainly associated with sweet and sour tasting foods while low pitched notes are more commonly paired with more bitter and umami tastes.”

“In one study, participants tasted pieces of cinder toffee while listening to different soundtracks–one with higher and one with lower pitched tones. The toffee was then rated on a scale that ranged from bitter to sweet. The result was a bittersweet symphony, showing that the participants found the toffee sweeter when paired with higher pitches and more bitter when accompanied by lower pitches. Unbeknownst to them, the toffee was identical–it was only the sound that had changed.”

In another study, test subjects displayed a preference for citric acid, orange flower and particularly caffeine when listening to brass instruments. Peppermint was the flavour of choice when listening to piano music. The graph below illustrates the preferred flavours when subjects listened to piano, strings, woodwind and brass instruments. [via The Creator’s Project]