‘Sounds salty!’ How a soundtrack affects the liking and perception of the salty balance in bread

Abstract

Research on cross-modal correspondence has revealed interesting findings regarding how sound can affect our taste/flavour perception of food. To address the issue of excess salt in a typical Westerner's diet, approximately 30% of our daily salt intake comes from bread and cereal. Taking this fact as a starting point, the present study investigates the associations between designed soundtracks as taste stimuli for salt and sensory evaluation of bread baked with two different levels of salt. Two experiments were conducted. In Experiment 1, 265 consumers were asked to match four soundtracks with basic taste words such as ‘sweet’, ‘salty’, and ‘sour’. In Experiment 2, 342 consumers tasted bread while listening either to a soundtrack that had been described as ‘salty’ in Experiment 1 or to no sound. The consumers then evaluated their overall liking for the bread and the bread's taste balance in terms of saltiness and sourness. Our findings confirm that consumers can associate different soundtracks with different tastes and that sound can enhance a person's taste perception of salt in bread. Thus, sound can cause consumers to perceive a higher salt intensity in bread without the actual presence of more salt, or even when the salt content has been decreased. From a health perspective, certain soundtracks may hold potential for promoting a reduction in consumers' salt intake by enhancing their perception of saltiness in food.