Ratatouille: That Sounds Sweet!

Whenever I watch Pixar’s Ratatouille, one of the most fascinating scenes was seeing Emile consume a grape and a piece of cheese while Remy describes the experience. While Remy describes a “creamy, salty, sweet” and “oaky nuttiness”, what I think is a low bass guitar plays softly in the background. As he describes “smooth, crisp, slight tang on the finish”, sweet percussion instruments create an ethereal sound. When Emile eats the two together, an explosion of color and an amalgam of sound occurs. While it may seem like the director Brad Bird used creative license here, he actually wasn’t off the mark. Contrary to popular belief, taste is a multimodal experience. This means that we recruit all 5 senses- hearing, taste, touch, smell, and sight- when we savor our food. In fact, the color (for example, red) can enhance the sweetness of let’s say, strawberries. It’s easy to see how vision or smell might influence taste, but what does hearing have to do with it?

Researchers have already established that we tend to use the same adjectives to describe music and our taste experience (Knöferle and Spence, 2012; as cited by Kontukoski, et al., 2015). For example, “sweet” ,”dry”, “light”, “soft”, and “crisp” are all words I’d use to describe an introductory Disney movie song and a good bag of potato chips. People also take these associations a step further. When musicians were asked to improvise musical theme from basic taste words like “sweet”, “salty”, “bitter”, and “sour”, certain words corresponded to certain musical patterns (Mesz, Trevisan, & Sigman, 2011, as cited by Kontukoski, et al., 2015). Take a look at the song Edeilwess, as sung by Captain Georg Von Trapp (Theodore Bikel) in Rodger and Hammerstein’s Sound of Music.

The flow of the song is consistent, slow, and soft. This was similar to the patterns created by the taste word “sweet”. On the other hand, take a look at the song Your Fault from Into the Woods (2014).

It seems erratic or dissonant as the different characters chirp in with often high-pitched voices. These sort of musical patterns were improvised under the “sour” category. Lastly, “bitter” improvisations were both low-pitched and legato, much like the Gregorian chanting seen at the beginning of The Hunchback of Notre Dame’s Hellfire.

People also link music to other words related to the basic tastes. For example, in Kontukoski, et al.’s (2015) study, people often used the words like “chocolate”, “tasty”, “dessert”, “velvety”, and “creamy” to describe a “sweet” musical piece- all words I’d associate with having a great experience savoring a decadent piece of chocolate cake. On the other hand, people used more “unpleasant” taste sensations when describing “sour” music, like “hard”, “pungent”, “strong”, and “burning”, among others.

Listening to certain kinds of music not only influence associations, but how we choose to act.   Kontukoski, et al. (2015) also asked their participants to mix a drink after listening to a piece of music. When people listened to “sweet” music, their drink had higher sugar content (including honey, mango juice, and pineapple juice). The reverse was found after listening to “sour” music; the drink had more sour ingredients with higher acidity (lemon and pineapple juice).

Dr. Frankenstein was probably listening to some weird music when he made his monster...

While all these things seem to occur in the vacuum of an experiment, these effects are also evident in a world where Top 40 songs are constantly blaring on as we eat at fast food joints. Music may seem like background noise as you concentrate on that juicy piece of chicken in front of you, but it may play a much more important role than many realize. For example, one study (Wang  & Spence, 2015) was set up in a wine tasting event with live classical music. When a high-pitched and fast Debussy piece was played, the wine was given significantly high acidity and low fruitiness ratings. However, the slower Rachmaninoff piece was given the opposite (low acidity, high fruitiness). This was true whether a person was given red wine, which tends to be sweeter, or white wine, which was made to be more sour and citrusy. Looking back on word-associations, this actually makes sense (you’ll have your explanation later, but I don’t want to spoil it for you …try figuring it out). 

They also tried seeing how music influences our experience of an all-time favorite of mine, chocolate (Carvalho, et al., 2015). This time, they used a Brazilian song- a song that wasn’t deliberately manipulated to modulate taste like in previous experiments. They found out that when the participants were told that the chef used the music as his source of inspiration for creating the chocolate, they significantly liked the chocolate more as compared to other conditions wherein they were not told as such. In fact, they enjoyed it so much that they were also the most willing to pay for it! It didn’t matter that the participants didn’t know who the chef was or were unfamiliar with the music, they nevertheless still enjoyed it. This honestly seems like an interesting marketing strategy. Could this be the end of an era where famous

Inspired by Cool for the Summer by Demi Lovato

people create fragrances with their name slapped on it, and the start of a new craze where chefs create mints dedicated to 5 Seconds of Summer’s new album? While it is an interesting proposal, the problem here is that by simply creating an air of likeability for the chocolate (“Wow! The chef handcrafted this chocolate because he was inspired by the music? This is special!”), this may have contributed to the participants’ tasting experience.

But what could be the reason behind these associations and preferences? One fascinating explanation is through the cognitive priming theory. Let us use the aforementioned Debussy piece to argue this case. Because we derive symbolic meaning (a fast pace and high-pitch is related to “sourness”) from the music we hear, we also activate information related to these terms (“sourness” strongly relates to “acidity”). When this happens, it becomes easier to access these ideas when we think about something.  So these associations ("Man, this drink sure has high acidity!") are what we retrieve as we taste and evaluate the wine.

I must end this post with a small word of caution: as with many crossmodal studies, we have yet to truly establish how the relationship between music and taste perception works. But while we can’t definitely say that food tastes better when accompanied by the right music (thanks to priming), it definitely wouldn’t hurt to try eating some French food while listening to the Ratatouille soundtrack.

Carvalho, F. R., Van Ee, R., Rychtarikova, M., Touhafi, A., Steenhaut, K., Persoone, D., & Spence, C. (2015). Using sound-taste correspondences to enhance the subjective value of tasting experiences. Frontiers in psychology,6.

Knöferle, K. and Spence, C. (2012), “Crossmodal correspondences between sounds and tastes”, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, Vol. 19, pp. 992-1006

Kontukoski, M., Luomala, H., Mesz, B., Sigman, M., Trevisan, M., Rotola-Pukkila, M., & Hopia, A. I. (2015). Sweet and sour: music and taste associations. Nutrition & Food Science, 45(3), 357-376.

Mesz, B., Trevisan, M.A. and Sigman, M. (2011), “Taste of music”, Perception, Vol. 40 No. 2, pp.209-219.

Wang, Q. J., & Spence, C. (2015). Assessing the Effect of Musical Congruency on Wine Tasting in a Live Performance Setting. i-Perception, 6(3), 2041669515593027.