Food names and environmental sounds may play a role in people's perception about chocolate, biscuits and confectionery. Hearing auditory cues while viewing food names can influence people's impressions of food tastes, according to researchers. Just like songs, which tap into emotions that affect other senses, the combination of words and sounds can paint pictures in the mind. Here's a look at evidence that suggests a relationship between food names, sounds and taste.
How Senses Work Together
Most people, including marketers, probably don't stop to think much about how sound relates to other things in nature. Sound, of course, is a result of vibrations in the air. These soundwaves can be measured by how many cycles occur per second. The more frequent the vibrations move, the higher the pitch (corresponding with higher frequency). To be clear, frequency is a physical property of sound, whereas pitch is a perception of frequency.
Taste also involves perception. It is the result of a chemical reaction in the mouth between food and taste buds comprised of taste receptor cells mainly on the tongue. It is this process that creates the perception of flavors. The tongue is populated with thousands of tiny visible bumps called papillae, each of which contain hundreds of taste buds. The five basic tastes are usually described as sweet, sour, salty, bitter and savory (also known as umami, a mild meaty or brothy flavor). Additionally, certain spices have a spicy or pungent taste, which sometimes correlates with hot temperature.
But chemical reactions are not the only factor that create the sensation of taste, also called gustation. The senses of sight, smell, touch and hearing also contribute to a perception of whether or not something tastes a certain way. Temperature is also a sensory modality, which is a perception generated after receptors are stimulated. Multisensory modality is the combination of all these senses working together, adding up to an overall perception. It should be noted that as a person advances past middle age, taste perception begins to decline.
Experimenting with Tastes, Sounds and Visuals
Research at the University of Oxford's Department of Experimental Psychology on associations between taste and pitch perception was conducted in 2009 and published the following year by Anne-Sylvie Crisinel and Charles Spence. Target tastes were tested with high and low pitches to find out if any relationships existed.
Using musical instruments to compare pitches, high-pitched sounds were represented by a clarinet, piano, trumpet and violin. Low-pitched sounds came from a bassoon, piano, bass trombone and a cello. Basically, participants heard musical sounds and saw names of food on a screen and were asked to make associations between them.
The visual stimuli consisted of words such as salty, sweet, bitter and sour with neutral words also mixed in. Participants were asked to select food and drink names from a list and associate them with sounds. The results of the study suggested that sweet tastes were associated with high pitches while salty tastes corresponded with low pitches. These implied associations were based on how quickly respondents reacted to the stimuli.
Conclusion
The reason entities that sell chocolate, biscuits and confectionery should look deeper into this type of research is that there may be a subtle correlation of perceptions between food names, auditory cues and tastes. These associations may affect purchasing decisions and may be enhanced by learning from further more comprehensive research.
