It’s true, sound can influence (and enhance) taste. It’s called sonic seasoning – and we talked to Oxford expert Professor Charles Spence all about it.
When we think of wine pairing, we usually picture little dishes of brightly flavoured food paired with fancy half-glasses of wine – but what if we could extend that idea to other senses? What if what we hear could influence, or even enhance, what we taste?
That may seem far-fetched, but according to experts like Professor Charles Spence, wine and music are more intrinsically linked than we realise. In his study Multisensory experiential wine marketing, Professor Spence points out that wine writers often use musical metaphors and similes to describe what they’re tasting. Take, for example, this excerpt Professor Spence highlights from Hugh Johnson’s book, Wine: a Life Uncorked: “I have tasted first-attempt chardonnays that were like Dizzy Gillespie’s solos: all over the place. And the colour of his trumpet, too… Joe Heitz, though, is surely Armstrong at the Sunset Café; virtuoso, perverse and glorious.”
Likewise, music can be equated to wine. It was none other than Ludwig van Beethoven, perhaps the most famous composer of the romantic period, who said: “Music is the wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for humankind.”
In this century, you have writers like Paul White, publishing prose like this in The World of Fine Wine: “…it’s hard to think of music that is more transparently effervescent than Steve Reich’s Octet and Music for Large Ensemble. Both have textural aspects strongly reminiscent of Champagne. Bouncing along optimistically, motives advance and recede like the frothy mousse of a freshly poured glass: Bubbles forming and popping with little explosive jolts, instantly replaced by others.”
While we wine journos can be known to garnish our pieces with flowery language, it’s no coincidence that the language we use to describe a wine’s taste can be very similar to how we perceive and describe music. And if there are elements of enjoying a tune and sipping a wine that trigger similar responses, then surely they can influence each other.
With this in mind, we chatted to Professor Spence, head of the Crossmodal Research Laboratory at the University of Oxford’s Department of Experimental Psychology, about his multisensory research.
Professor Spence has been intrigued by the connections between the senses since an experimental project on cross-modal perception led him to more in-depth study. “I have always been passionate about trying to apply our emerging understanding of the complexities of the human mind to the real world,” he explains. “And while I started out studying hearing, vision, and then touch, over the last couple of decades my focus has increasingly shifted toward the study of multisensory flavour experiences.”
Professor Spence’s work builds off the idea that we all experience links between taste (including flavour and aroma) and music. To illustrate his point, he uses the example that most people will intuitively match a sweet taste with a higher pitch, a sour taste with more irregular or dissonant tones, and bitter tastes with lower-pitched sounds.
“If you select music, or create sonic compositions, that have the matching attributes for specific tastes or flavours then it can help to draw the listener’s attention to something in their tasting experience that they might not otherwise have been aware of,” Professor Spence explains. “It is a bit like at a normal wine class. The expert asks if you can detect a note of gooseberry or cat’s pee, and suddenly it is there in your experience. In fact, the sensations were there all the time, but you weren’t concentrating on them.”
This same tactic can be used in an almost synaesthetic manner – “play some tinkling high-pitched music and suddenly the sweetness is more apparent, play some low rough sounds and the body and astringency gets dialled up.”
Professor Spence jokes that so far, they can’t turn water into wine musically, but they can use music and specially composed soundscapes to “draw a taster’s attention to a particular aspect of their complex tasting experience.”
If you’re interested in trying out the science, the best place to start is with a red and a white wine paired with some classical music – “Carmina Burana by Carl Orff for a red; Mozart Flute Concerto for a white,” says Professor Spence.
He even holds special gastrophysics sonic seasoning dinners, where guests are given a glass of red and a glass of white, played a piece of music, and asked to lift the glass that best matches what they’re hearing. “When the majority of the diners raise the red glass to the Orff and their white glass to Mozart, it is immediately apparent to everyone there is something here that needs explaining.”
The first experiment in this area of science was back in 1969 and done using beer. According to Professor Spence, matching beer and music depends on the type of beer and its alcohol percentage. The more alcoholic the beer, the higher in pitch the music needs to be to pair well. The same goes for whether the beer is light or dark in colour.
“We have worked with Stella Artois and the pop group The Roots to create a new pop song (‘Sweet till the bitter end’) and accompanying video that consumers could modify to bring out more of the sweetness or bitterness in their beer,” Professor Spence says. “A few years later, we worked with the Guinness master brewer and some video artists to create audiovisual VR experiences to match the taste of the Guinness Porter and Hop House 13 Lager.”
So it works for beer and wine, what about something that has more pronounced flavours to it, like a cocktail?
“I was just demonstrating the art and science of sonic seasoning with amaro and coffee bitters cocktails for some rather distinguished guests in the Ristorante Armani on Fifth Ave in New York City only a couple of weeks ago,” Professor Spence explains. “It was really fun to see how some of the guests who were really sceptical about the idea of sonic seasoning to begin with have the sweet/bitter balance of the drink change in real time as I switched back and forth between the bitter and sweet tracks.”
Going beyond the broad categories of ‘red’ or ‘white’ takes a bit more work, but it’s certainly possible. Professor Spence says they now have musical menus that pair a whole number of auditory qualities to the basic tastes – sweet, bitter, salty and sour, as well as creamy and spicy music pairings.
“We have matches for various aroma notes too, though many quality wines will take the taster on a complex flavour journey over the course of a minute. Hence, in some of our more recent research, we use the Temporal Dominance of Sensations (TDS) technique to assess what taste and flavour sensations are dominant over an extended taste of say one minute,” Professor Spence explains.
They then work with sound designers, composers and producers to create what he calls “sonic scores that evolve to emphasise the relevant elements of the taste experience.” The goal is true immersion in the senses. “Having people taste the wine, or in some cases whisky, while the soundscape develops creates a really mindful tasting experience.”
If you’re familiar with wine tastings, you'll know that a perfect food pairing isn’t just a complementary experience, but one that extends the flavour on the palate. While trickier to do with music, if it were able to be achieved you’d get what Professor Spence calls an “emergent multisensory gestalt – where at the pitch of harmony there is something in the combined music and taste experience that you simply can’t find when just drinking the wine or listening to the music separately.”
“I have also come across the occasional person who has been brought to tears by particularly effective multisensory matches,” says Professor Spence. “At the same time, there is also sensation transference, meaning that the more you like what you are listening to, the more you will like whatever you are tasting.”
Instrumental scores and soundscapes aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. Luckily, this same science does extend to other more popular forms of music, it’s just a little trickier to perfect as most of the research has been done with classical and romantic instrumental music.
“It works with all kinds of music: jazz, opera, drum and bass, lounge, you name it. However, the thing about pairing wine with classical music is that not only can the music season the wine, but it also makes the wine seem more expensive than playing Top 40 hits,” Professor Spence says. Just like wine, it’s all a matter of preference, really. It can’t hurt to experiment with Madonna or Metallica.
Dine in the Dark experiences were quite the craze a few years back. While these were built on the theory that eliminating a sense would enhance the experience of the palate, Professor Spence explains that sight is actually pivotal to our flavour expectations.
Professor Spence worked with nearly 200 wine experts, winemakers, wine writers, and sommeliers in Barcelona for a study about sight and taste, revealing some interesting findings: “We gave them two white wines and a rosé, but one of the whites was coloured so it looked just like the rosé wine. It was amazing to see how everyone tasted flavour notes in the miscoloured white that they simply didn’t get in the regular white, despite them actually being identical.”
As for touch, could there be a link there too? “Well, the thing is heavier things taste and smell better,” Professor Spence explains.
“My colleagues are often paranoid about what wine they should bring to dinner at my house. I always tell them – just make sure it is in a heavy bottle. When we studied all wines in the Oxford Wine Company store a few years ago, we found that for every extra pound sterling you pay for a bottle of wine you get an average of eight grams extra of glass.” Professor Spence’s advice is to always serve drinks in “heavier cans, cups, mugs, and people will, on average, rate it as tasting better.”
In more futuristic wine-tasting experiences, people taste wine while rubbing various textures like sandpaper or silk. According to Professor Spence, many people can almost immediately feel a link between texture and taste.
