Abstract
Here we investigate associations between complex auditory and complex taste stimuli. A novel piece of music was composed and recorded in four different styles of musical articulation to reflect the four basic tastes groups (sweet, sour, salty, bitter). In Experiment 1, participants performed above chance at pairing the music clips with corresponding taste words. Experiment 2 uses multidimensional scaling to interpret how participants categorize these musical stimuli, and to show that auditory categories can be organized in a similar manner as taste categories. Experiment 3 introduces four different flavors of custom-made chocolate ganache and shows that participants can match music clips with the corresponding taste stimuli with above-chance accuracy. Experiment 4 demonstrates the partial role of pleasantness in crossmodal mappings between sound and taste. The present findings confirm that individuals are able to make crossmodal associations between complex auditory and gustatory stimuli, and that valence may mediate multisensory integration in the general population.
Highlights
Audition and gustation are two complex sensory and perceptual experiences
Even when multisensory experiences are automatic, as in the case of synesthesia, much work suggests that synesthetes rely on broader cognitive mechanisms and that these associations may generalize to a greater population [5,6,7]
A chi-square test for association, with cell arrays organized by each of the eight music clips and each of the four taste labels, is significant, χ(21, N = 159) = 60.17, p < 0.001, confirming that there was an association between music clips and chosen taste labels
Summary
Audition and gustation are two complex sensory and perceptual experiences. While hearing and tasting are both universal biological systems, they are strongly influenced by culture and learning. Rather than considering these sensory modalities as separate entities, here we explore if, and to what extent, humans form associations between complex sound and complex taste, and what mechanism may underlie these crossmodal experiences. Crossmodal associations, may represent normal mechanisms that link the perception of one modality to another, integrating faculties such as attentional binding, linguistic thought, learning and memory, and preferences for pleasantness [8]. We hope that a deeper understanding of these mechanisms can inform how and why dramatic individual differences in perception exist
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