"Hearing & Listening" To Our Food - Music's Hidden Connection to Eating

Food is one of our most basic necessities in life that nourishes our souls, nourishes us physically and emotionally. When we eat we usually think about engaging 4 of our senses: taste, smell, sight and touch. But do we “listen” to our food? Does music influence our appetite and how we perceive the food we eat? Music and food are two things that I absolutely love and to that I say of course it does! To the food connoisseurs who describe more than the texture, smell, sight and taste, often they also describe the food as “crispy”, “crunchy” or “bubbly”. They are engaging the sound of the food they are eating. That’s why chips taste better when they are crispy because if we don’t hear the crisp when biting down that means the chips are stale - YUCK! Immediately hearing non-crispy chips lead to my own personal dislike of stale chips. In fact there have been studies that show exactly this hidden connection that most of us don’t think about it.

Let’s take our restaurant experiences for instance. A very common social experience where we get together with family and friends to indulge ourselves in the latest gossip but have you ever talked about how you love the atmosphere at a particular location and what made that experience more memorable than others? It’s more than just the great service, food, lighting, décor but also the science behind music that is played!

The tempo, pitch, volume, and timbre (tone, quality) of the music played all influence our restaurant experiences. For example, naturally fast and upbeat music speeds us up so we tend to eat quicker whereas slower music slows us down and we spend more time eating. Loud music causes “stress” which in turn causes us to eat more as we commonly know as “emotional eating” and causes us to gravitate towards more sweet foods. The genre of music can also affect the food we eat. For example, one study showed that jazz music enhances our food liking compared to when hip-hop music is played - (personally I'm not so sure about that because I've only been to Baiju once, they play only R&B and Hip-Hop and I LOVE everything about it!)

Pitch can also influence our overall food perception. A study by Crisinel and Spence (2010) discovered the correlation between high vs. low-pitched music. High-pitched sounds are associated with sweet and sour while lower pitched sounds are associated with bitter and umami. High-pitched sounds of the piano for instance are quite “sweet” and pleasant to the ear but on the contrary some high-pitched sounds can cause our faces to scrunch up like eating a sour apple or candy. This suggests that the type of instrumentation even if it remains in the high-pitched areas can affect our flavour perception. Low-pitched sounds can be associated with larger objects or signify danger – let’s take the unforgettable low-pitched string riff that signified the approach of the shark in JAWS that can be associated with bitterness.

Music like taste can create emotional links. The smell of apple crisp pie can bring you back to when you were a child in your mom’s kitchen during the Christmas holiday. Music also has the power to create flow of energy that consumers feed off of that can bring us back to a particular moment in time you remembered having the time of your life. Here exists a positive correlation between the fact that one likes a music played in a restaurant and one’s level of affection for this restaurant. A restaurant called Fat Duck serves their fish course with an ipod that plays “Sounds of the Sea”. The music is written to spark memories of the seaside in the diners’ imagination to heighten their perception and the fish will taste “fresher” when listening while eating the fish course (Jones, 2010).

So the next time you are out with your friends grabbing a bite to eat, listen to how your food sounds and the playlist that the venue plays! What are your favourite restaurants and could it be due to the type of music they play?

Crisinel, A.S., Cosser, S., King, S., Jones, R., Petrie, J. and Spence, C. (2012). A bittersweet symphony: systematically modulating the taste of food by changing the sonic properties of the soundtrack playing in the background.

Food Quality and Preference24: 201-204.

Jones, R. (2010). Condiment Junkie:Fat Duck seascape. http://condimentjunkie.co.uk/blog/2014/3/1/fat-duck-seascape

Jones, R. (2014). Condiment Junkie:Bittersweet Symphony.

http://condimentjunkie.co.uk/blog/2014/6/20/bittersweet-symphony