Abstract
We explored the putative existence of crossmodal correspondences between sound attributes and beverage temperature. An online pre-study was conducted first, in order to determine whether people would associate the auditory parameters of pitch and tempo with different imagined beverage temperatures. The same melody was manipulated to create a matrix of 25 variants with five different levels of both pitch and tempo. The participants were instructed to imagine consuming hot, room-temperature, or cold water, then to choose the melody that best matched the imagined drinking experience. The results revealed that imagining drinking cold water was associated with a significantly higher pitch than drinking both room-temperature and hot water, and with significantly faster tempo than room-temperature water. Next, the online study was replicated with participants in the lab tasting samples of hot, room-temperature, and cold water while choosing a melody that best matched the actual tasting experience. The results confirmed that, compared to room-temperature and hot water, the experience of cold water was associated with both significantly higher pitch and fast tempo. Possible mechanisms and potential applications of these results are discussed.
Highlights
In recent years, a growing body of empirical research has revealed various surprising yet robust crossmodal correspondences between auditory and gustatory stimulus attributes
High pitch tended to be associated with fast tempo, and low pitch with slow tempo, when it came to choosing the best matching melody for imagined cold and hot temperature drinks
This pattern of results can be seen in the colour-coded participant response frequency grid in Fig. 4, where the tendency for responses to cluster along the pitch-tempo diagonal is greater for the cold water and hot water conditions compared to the room-temperature condition
Summary
A growing body of empirical research has revealed various surprising yet robust crossmodal correspondences between auditory and gustatory stimulus attributes. People reliably associate a number of musical parameters, such as pitch, tempo, and timbre, with basic tastes Correspondences between sound and the oral–somatosensory attributes of the eating/drinking experience (e.g., temperature, texture, viscosity) have mostly been limited to those sounds that are related to the consumption of food products. The sounds associated with the opening of product packaging can, for instance, communicate freshness, while the sounds of a liquid being poured might indicate levels of carbonation and viscosity, or perhaps the shape of the container, not to mention the liquid’s temperature (see Spence and Wang, 2015, for a review)
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