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Music can make your food taste better

Remember that delicious dinner you had the other night? Apart from the chef’s prowess in the kitchen, perhaps the colour and sounds of the restaurant you were at might also have something to do with making it such a pleasurable dining experience.

Sound and colour can enhance your eating experience. Photo: Getty Images

Sound and colour can enhance your eating experience. Photo: Getty Images

Remember that delicious dinner you had the other night? Apart from the chef’s prowess in the kitchen, perhaps the colour and sounds of the restaurant you were at might also have something to do with making it such a pleasurable dining experience.

We all know that music can affect our moods, but apparently, sound can bring music to the taste buds, as academics have proven eating pleasure can be enhanced by the right tune. Colour can also improve the experience of both food and drink, said Oxford academic Professor Charles Spence, a professor of experimental psychology. Music can even trick the mind into thinking food tastes different in what he described as “digital seasoning”, and the right sound can enhance drinking pleasure by as much as 15 per cent.

This isn’t some fanciful science fiction story. Already, one major champagne house has adopted music, from Bryan Ferry to Tchaikovsky, to accompany its luxury products. British celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal is also among restaurateurs who have sought the professor’s advice for his award-winning Fat Duck in Bray.

“The traditional view (that sound has little role to play in our flavour experiences) contrasts with the position adopted by a number of contemporary modernist chefs such as Heston Blumenthal who, for one, is convinced that you need to engage all of a diner’s senses if you want to create truly memorable dishes,” Spence wrote in his review.

“We have found that people can experience 15 per cent more pleasure if music matches the wine,” Spence said. “It is an exciting area: How soundscapes come together with taste to make the whole experience more enjoyable.”

The academic believes ours ears can unconsciously inform the taste buds and humans also tend to match the same sounds to the same tastes. Sourness, for example, is apparently high-pitched; while sweetness is a more rounded sound; and bitterness is usually expressed in deeper, more mordant tones. In one test, the professor found people eating the same chocolate thought it was more bitter when sombre music was played and sweeter when accompanied with lighter sounds. The one taste that Spence hasn’t quite cracked yet is saltiness — though some might argue that any old sea shanty ought to work. Or perhaps something such as John Cage’s Mushrooms et Variationes (although picky modernists might say that mushrooms represent not salty but umami).

He is now working with the champagne house Krug, which has created an app matching champagnes from particular years.

As well as Ferry, the music of jazz pianist Jacky Terrasson is ideal for Krug Grande Cuvee 2003 and Tchaikovsky’s String Quartet No 1 in D Major was a very good match for Chateau Margaux 2004. Colour can also play a role: Recent tests in London showed ambient light can enhance flavour: Red wine drunk in red light was said to be fruitier.

Nevertheless, Spence wrote in his review that while it was worth noting that “the majority of the research ... has focused on the moment of tasting or consumption”, it was also apparent that “that much of our enjoyment of food and drink actually resides in the anticipation of consumption and the subsequent memories we have, at least when it comes to those food experiences that are worth remembering”.

That’s some food for thought — but perhaps with appropriate background music. AGENCIES

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