Sounds Delicious: The Influence of Music-Induced Emotion on Your Tasting Experience
Picture this: You’re sitting at your favorite bar and order a beer that you usually like. Your friend offers up a song request to the DJ. How much hangs in the balance in this moment? It may be more than you’d think. If your friend chooses the right song, you may experience your beer as tasting better, sweeter, and even being worth more money. If your friend selects something by a band like (at the risk of editorializing) Nickelback, your experience may not be so positive. You might be familiar with the general idea that eating is a multisensory experience. Anyone who has tried to enjoy their ideal meal with a stuffed-up nose can attest to the power of smell (or, in this case, lack of smell) over perceived flavor. In recent years, however, researchers have discovered surprisingly significant and intricate links between sound and eating experiences.
Researchers are focusing on this issue in part because of its potential to inform multisensory branding and advertising. Just imagine the marketing implications of knowing which kinds of music can add enjoyment and value to a person’s eating experience, and which will likely have the opposite effect. Part of what makes this area so intriguing to scientists is the fact that the reasons behind these outcomes from the interaction are not obvious. Researchers have found that there are certain parameters such as instrumentation and pitch that can be used to change the tasting experience. One example of this is the association of bitter tastes with lower-pitched sounds and sweet tastes with higher-pitched sounds. This doesn’t mean that hearing an opera singer hit a high A while biting into a ghost pepper will make the experience a walk in the park, but the findings are exciting nonetheless.
Based on these associations, some researchers have developed flavor or taste-related tracks aimed to influence how consumers judge different foods. You may be imagining songs packed with lyrics about fresh produce and melty cheese, but that’s not quite the case. For example, it has been shown that sound can influence the taster’s evaluation of wine. The root of this influence lies in the emotions induced by the sounds rather than the content of the sounds themselves. Outside of the realm of alcohol, it has also been found that the perception of the bitterness and sweetness of toffee and chocolate can be modulated by music tracks that are customized to elicit specific reactions. These findings support the idea that choosing or designing music to adjust people’s judgments of food and drink is possible.
Correspondences between these senses, like high pitches being associated with sweet flavors, isn’t the only explanation for the associations between sound and taste. It’s supported in the literature that multisensory effects can be mediated by emotional reactions to the music, or personal preferences. Consumers in general tend to enjoy their food more while listening to jazz than while listening to hip-hop. This illustrates the way that different kinds of music can impact the perceived value of a taste. Interestingly enough, one study found that consumers were willing to pay up to 20% more money for food when it was explicitly intentionally paired with music, indicating that people are cognizant of having significantly better tasting experiences when the sound they hear is presented as being intentionally heard with the food. Even with a growingly robust literature surrounding these interactions, there is much to be learned about how popular music could be used to modulate how consumers judge different hedonic (having to do with pleasantness) and flavor attributes of a tasting experience.
In a recent issue of Multisensory Research, researchers Reinoso-Carvaljo, Dakduk, Wagemans, & Spence report results from their study analyzing the influence of listening to music on the emotional processing of a multisensory tasting experience. First, the researchers administered a pre-test to ensure that participants were able to differentiate music tracks that were intended to resemble opposite emotional forces (positive vs negative emotions). You can listen to the music tracks here. Three of the four music tracks were ranked in their predicted manners, and the one that wasn’t was not used in the following experiments.
Next, the experimenters used one of the negative tracks and one of the positive tracks that were tested as participants sampled a Belgian beer. The beer was rated as having more body (the sensation of palate fullness) and a potentially stronger alcohol content when consumed with music playing than without music. When the beer was consumed while positive music played, it received higher ratings than the beer consumed while negative music played for how much the participants liked the beer, with the silent condition between the two types of music. The researchers then repeated the experiment, this time without the silent condition and with a different kind of beer. The results were replicated with the other beer, except that the judgment of the beer’s body wasn’t found to be significant the second time.
The study certainly was not perfect. Its design was susceptible to social desirability effects, which stem from the tendency of the participants to provide the answer that is desired by others. It was only tested with a Belgian beer, and the results may have differed with different kinds of beer that are also probably more common. Also, the scale used did not allow for differentiation between the impacts of two emotions from the same side of the positive vs negative coin, such as anger and sadness. However, the results of this study do suggest an intriguing future for marketing and advertising companies: It seems that the emotional impacts of music can be used to change how products are perceived by consumers. Obviously, brands have been using music to enhance marketing of their products for a long time now, but these results emphasize the importance of considering emotion as the middleman of this equation. I hope you’re taking notes, Don Drapers of the world!
Original study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31059486
