The taste of music

David Guedes, a psychologist and PhD candidate from the Center for Psychological Research and Social Intervention (CIS-Iscte), has recently shared some of his work in the "Conversas de Boca" podcast.

Elsa Lamy, a researcher from the University of Évora, organizes the "Conversas de Boca" (roughly translated: Mouth-talks) podcast, which is dedicated to sharing scientific research on eating and food.

On the third episode of the podcast, David Guedes talked about the multi-sensorial perception of music and other stimuli, including food. He also mentioned the cross-modal characteristic of perception, such as when our brain combines the color and taste of a fruit, for example. He aimed to study how sounds can be associated with food because auditory perception is often neglected in research on this topic.

He covered several examples, just as how crunchiness, related to sound, can influence taste perception or how the sound of opening a bottle of wine can affect the perception of its quality. He then focuses on his research, exploring how people associate certain music with the four modalities of taste (sweetness, sourness, saltiness, bitterness). You can listen to the full episode here (only in Portuguese).