We naturally reach for seasonings when a dish tastes too salty or too bland. Sonic seasoning proposes something different: shifting how we perceive food through sound, without altering a single ingredient. The proper sound in the right context, can make certain taste more pronounced, the sour taste sourer, the sweet taste sweeter.
It may sound unrealistic at first listen, because the taste of sweetness or sourness like the touchable stimulus cause the real reflection on the tongue, while the sound comes from the vibration in the air, one is through the mouth and another through the ear, how they can be related and even interact with each other to impact our perception?
The simple answer is the meaning or feeling behind they brought us. We can see this phenomenon using language. For example, we might call a rich, fatty dish ‘heavy’, and use the very same word to describe music that is low-pitched and rough in timbre. This kind of alignment is something we call cross-modal correspondence.
When music and food exist in the same experience, how brain organize the experience becomes the key to sonic seasoning. Cross-modal correspondence is not just a phenomenon being investigated, the mechanism also being leveraged commercially to enhance experiences on various context.
During Christmas 2024, KFC Singapore reworked Jingle Bells as a sonic seasoning for its limited-edition Parmesan Truffle Fried Chicken, using low-frequency sounds to enhance umami and sharp, high-frequency sounds to accentuate crispiness.
Champagne house Krug has similarly invited musicians to compose pieces for its Grande Cuvée. To me, these pieces share a common approach: bright timbres and lively rhythms echo the champagne’s fine, rising bubbles, while richer musical textures convey the complexity and weight of an aged champagne.
Where Sound Meets Taste: The Shared Interpreted Meaning
The fundamental function of our senses is to help us understand the surrounding environment, serving two of our basic needs: survival and development. To navigate a world full of uncertainty, vision, hearing, smell, taste, and touch receive different types of stimuli, yet constantly interact to shape our understanding of the world. Food and music may seem like a multisensory interaction reserved for pleasure, but they are simply an extension of the same system.
Over time, continuous multisensory inputs allow the brain to build connections between features that repeatedly occur together, turning these regularities into subconscious associations. These subconscious associations are one important source of cross-modal correspondences. We recognize a lemon as a lemon 🍋 because we see its yellow color, taste its sourness, and feel its relatively rough skin. These features repeatedly occur together, forming stable image about lemon. Why we never expect a lemon to have pink skin? Simply because naturally grown lemons are not pink. It does not fit the model of a lemon that we have built through experience.
The lemon is a simple example. Things become more complicated when music meets food. Musical features such as timbre, rhythm, and melody are fundamentally different from the texture, mouthfeel, and aroma of food. They are not directly comparable. So what allows the brain to connect them?
What corresponds across the senses is not the stimulus or object itself, but a perceptual impression, a rapid grasp of its overall character, formed before we verbalize it.
Think about meeting someone for the first time and instinctively feel that “I should stay away from this person,” without being able to explain why. Such an impression does not come from nowhere. Drawing on experience, the brain integrates many cues that we do not consciously notice into an overall judgment.
Similarly, when we listen to the music. We do not need to break down its rhythm, timbre, or melody one by one to grasp its general emotional gist and form an overall impression of the piece. A compact description of that impression might be, a lively dance track, a bright flute melody, or a complex and weighty symphony. Tasting works in much the same way. We often form an overall impression of a dish or a glass of drink first, then gradually pick up finer details with the second taste, the third, and beyond.
The way we use language reveals that these perceptual impressions are not exclusive to any single sensory channel. The same descriptors can be applied across different senses.
For example, we might describe the refreshing, non-cloying character of a lemon soda as lively, the rich layers of an aged red wine as complex, or a citrusy pour-over coffee as bright. The way we use language gives us a glimpse of how naturally such correspondences can emerge across the senses.
When cues from different senses point toward the same perceptual impression, they can reinforce one another. Compared with a single cue, mutually reinforcing cues may be more likely to capture our attention and move into the perceptual foreground. This cross-sensory resonance can make a particular taste stand out more strongly in the overall experience, subjectively making sour taste sourer.
It is much like having a crush on someone, everyone else seems to fade into background noise. But that does not mean the ‘noise’ has disappeared, your attention is simply drawn more strongly to that ‘person’ signal.
The Boundary of Sonic Seasoning
Wine tasting notes extensively discussed pairings between wine and classical music long before scientists began seriously studying them. Wine critics often described a wine’s overall character through its resonance with the perceptual impressions evoked by classical music. Researchers later began breaking these impressions down into measurable variables, looking for more specific correspondences between taste and musical features such as pitch, rhythm, and timbre.
In one experiment pairing classical music with wine, participants generally matched a fresh, high-acidity Loire Valley Sauvignon Blanc with Mozart’s Flute Quartet: the flute’s light, bright timbre resonated with the wine’s light body, while its lively rhythm echoed the freshness of its acidity. This suggests that even without professional training, people may share certain intuitions about how music and wine fit together. Though Mozart was not everyone’s first choice. If such associations are shaped by accumulated experience, differences in culture, language, and environment may naturally lead to variations in these correspondences.
Furthermore, professional training does not seem to eliminate the effect from another experiment. Music still influenced wine professionals’ perceptions of flavor and structure regardless of their tasting experience. More strikingly, participants in another experiment rated the same white wine as significantly more acidic with Debussy’s Jardins sous la pluie than with Rachmaninoff’s Vocalise.
Together, these findings suggest that such intuitive pairings are not arbitrary. Their persistence despite later training and accumulated experience points to an underlying mechanism that may be rooted in more fundamental biological processes of perception.
What is clearer are the more basic correspondences between sound and taste, particularly those involving sourness, sweetness, and bitterness. Sourness tends to be associated with sharp, dissonant, high-pitched sounds. Sweetness is also associated with higher pitches, but with softer and rounder sound qualities. Bitterness, by contrast, is more readily associated with low, deep, and heavy sounds.
Some of these correspondences make sense from a biological perspective. Sourness can signal unripe or spoiled food, while sharp and high-frequency sounds can signal potential threats in the environment. Both may therefore engage a heightened state of alertness. Sweetness is closely tied to energy and reward, making softer, rounder sounds a good match for both its pleasant character and the smooth, sometimes viscous mouthfeel often associated with sweet foods.
Bitterness seems somewhat different. From an evolutionary perspective, bitter taste often signals potentially harmful substances. We might expect bitterness to align more closely with sharp, alarming sounds to prevent us from toxin. Yet experiments tend to associate bitterness with low, deep, and heavy sound qualities.
This may suggest that cross modal correspondences involving bitterness are also shaped by learned experience. Bitter foods and drinks such as black coffee, dark chocolate, and strong tea often come with dark colors, substantial mouthfeel, and lingering finishes. The repeated cooccurrence of these features may gradually broaden the perceptual impression we associate with bitterness.
Sonic seasoning may sound magical, but it cannot turn bad food into good food, nor can a single piece of music transform whether we like a particular dish. In my view, its critical function is to create a coherent sensory context, making the overall experience more immersive.
A classic example comes from the British Michelin starred restaurant The Fat Duck. The signature dish Sound of the Sea dish is served with headphones playing sounds associated with the seaside. Waves, seagulls, boats and so on, creating the impression of eating by the shore. By placing the seafood within a coherent sensory scene, the experience is designed to become more immersive and to bring its umami character further into the foreground.
Music works more like a perceptual filter over taste. It may push certain characteristics of a food into the foreground. But ‘making sour taste sourer’ remains fundamentally a subjective perceptual effect. So far there is no objective tool that can directly measure the intensity of a taste.
Nor does every sensory resonance necessarily make an experience better. Any enhancement brought by the interaction between music and wine may disrupt the delicate balance of a well balanced wine.
Editor & Picture generated: ChatGPT
[1] Spence, C., Richards, L., Kjellin, E., Huhnt, A.-M., Daskal, V., Scheybeler, A., Velasco, C., & Deroy, O. (2013). Looking for crossmodal correspondences between classical music and fine wine. Flavour, 2, 29. https://doi.org/10.1186/2044-7248-2-29.
[2] Wang, Q. J., & Spence, C. (2018). Assessing the influence of music on wine perception among wine professionals. Food Science & Nutrition, 6(2), 295–301. https://doi.org/10.1002/fsn3.554.
[3] Wang, Q. J., & Spence, C. (2015). Assessing the effect of musical congruency on wine tasting in a live performance setting. i-Perception, 6(3), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1177/2041669515593027.
[4] Wang, Q. J., Wang, S., & Spence, C. (2016). “Turn up the taste”: Assessing the role of taste intensity and emotion in mediating crossmodal correspondences between basic tastes and pitch. Chemical Senses, 41(4), 345–356. https://doi.org/10.1093/chemse/bjw007.
[5] Guetta, R., & Loui, P. (2017). When music is salty: The crossmodal associations between sound and taste. PLOS ONE, 12(3), e0173366. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0173366.
[6] Spence, C. (2010). The influence of auditory cues on the perception of, and responses to, food and drink. Journal of Sensory Studies, 25(3), 406–430. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-459X.2009.00267.x
Yi Zhou 
Leave a comment