Author: Yang Gao

Title

A Bite of Note🎼

Project Description

My project is an experiment to explore the relation between sound and taste: how does different kind of music relate to our familiar taste? How does taste reminds us of music?

Perspective and Context

In the book The World of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty talks about the relationship between each senses. He states that “rather than being absolutely separate, each of these qualities has an affective meaning which establishes a correspondence between it and the qualities associated with the other senses.”(60) For example, taste has the relationship with the touch: “sugariness in the realm of taste. ‘an indelible softness that ligers in the mouth for an indefinite duration, that survives swallowing'”(61) Besides, taste also related to color (sight): “It is the sourness of the lemon which is yellow, it is the yellow of the lemon which is sour”(62)

Visual and touch participate in the process of we eating food directly, but how about sound? Does it also According to Merleau-Ponty, they should also be related to each other. So for my project, I would like to explore how sound and taste connected.

Development & Technical Implementation

Inspiration-Dine in the dark

I had an experience of dine in the dark last summer: we were blindfolded and we could only get the direction of the food followed the instruction by the guide. Without seeing, our taste and listening become more sensitive and communicated more and felt closer.

So for my project, since I only want the user’s listening and taste participate in the experiment, so I also chose to blindfold the participant.

Background-Research about sound & taste

• ‘The soundscape of those places where we eat and drink can influence our perception of taste.’

        

——Use sound-taste correspondences to enhance the subjective value of tasting experience

• ‘People who designed potato chip bags didn’t make them noisy for the sake of the chips. They made them noisy for the sensory experience.research has shown that if people hear the sound of that packaging being crumpled while they’re eating the chips, they will think that the chips are crisper, crunchier, fresher, better only because that sound is being played in the background.’

——How music can affect your sense of taste

Process

1⃣Get the fruits ready

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2⃣Let the participant listen to 6 selected music

3⃣Let the participant taste the 10 different types of fruits.

4⃣Let the participant to listen to the music again and choose 6 fruits to match with 6 songs.

Pretest

I did a pretest experiment and got some feedback from it. 

1⃣Put the fruits the most common fruits and gentle taste fruits in the end. Because people might forget about them after eating 10 fruits. Put lemon at the second one.

2⃣Choose music that is totally different from each other.

3⃣People might feel insecure when blindfolded, so give them instruction of what you gonna do and be patient.

4⃣Tell them it is ok to connect one fruit with several songs.

5⃣Prepare water and tissue.

Presentation

Video from the presentation🎥

Link🔗 https://youtu.be/kBL1mQippPg

(The video is labeled unlisted, only people with this link can view it)

The presentation went very well during the class. I’m very happy to get positive and valuable feedback from the participant. For my pretest, I let the participants taste fruits first and then listen to music and connect them together. But for presentation, I let the participant listen to the music twice and I think it works better. I feel sometimes it might take some times for the participants to connect the food with music, so I need to give them enough time when it comes to this steps. 

Conclusion

 “The music create a scenario that makes me feel like I’m eating this fruit.”

“When I listen to jazz, I pictured myself in a fancy restaurant and ate the strawberry on a dessert.”

“I have my way of understand the music, and the color of the music reminds me of the taste of the fruit.”

The experiment leads to one conclusion that what people listen will related to what they eat, which same as Merleau-Ponty pointed out, senses are related. Different feedback make me curious about what conclusion I will get if I get enough participants and collect data. For the further development, I think I’ll find music that most participants did not listen before, because I feel that music they don’t usually listen might give the most relevant answer in a sense.

In general, I really enjoy doing this project and am amazed by people’s responses. I would like to improve it and get more responses from more participants.