The sound environment as moderator of taste perception in fruit juice drinking experience

Abstract

One of the most multisensory experiences in our daily life is eating and drinking. Modifying external sensory properties (such as auditory stimuli) has been proposed as a promising framework for modulating taste perception. To this aim, it is relevant exploring the characteristic of the sound environment where people usually consume the juice that can moderate the taste perception in drinking fruit juice. This research conducted the juice tasting experiment focusing on individuals' flavour perception while listening to 7 sound environments in a controlled multisensory laboratory (Sens i-lab). The soundtracks were examined using several psychoacoustics parameters. such as, sound pressure level, loudness, Sharpness, Roughness, fluctuation, tonality, and Prominence were analysed. Correlation analysis reveal several patterns between the average taste rating of the orange juice and the psychometrics of 7 environmental sounds: for example. Sweet flavour of orange juice was negatively correlated with sound level, Roughness, and sound Prominence. Vice versa, sour flavour was positively correlated with the sound level, Roughness, and the average sound fluctuation. Further, the freshness of juice has negative correlation with sound Roughness and the juice thickness rating was negatively correlated with the average Sharpness of sound environment.