Assessing the impact of music on basic taste perception using time intensity analysis

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.