Assessing the impact of music on basic taste perception using time intensity analysis
Wang QJ., Mesz B., Spence C.
© 2017 Association for Computing Machinery. Several recent studies have examined the impact of music on the evaluation of food and drink, but none have relied on time-based methods. Since music and food/drink are both time-varying in nature, it would seem only appropriate to take temporality into account when studying the impact of music on the eating/drinking experience. A common method of time-based sensory evaluation of food products is time-intensity (TI), where a specific sensory attribute is measured over time. In the present investigation, we used TI analysis to measure temporal changes in sweetness and sourness evaluations of an off-dry white wine when the music stimulus changed from a soundtrack commonly associated with sweetness to one associated with sourness instead, and vice versa. The results revealed that a change of soundtrack results in a change in taste intensity (for both sweetness and sourness) in the same direction as the change in the soundtrack. More specifically, a switch from the sweet to the sour soundtrack enhanced the intensity of sourness, whereas a switch from sour to sweet soundtrack enhanced the perceived intensity of sweetness. Potential implications for the mechanisms underlying the auditory modification of taste and opportunities for future studies are discussed.