Having worked at the Dorchester, Hélène Darroze at the Connaught, Jozef Youssef and Oxford professor Charles Spence probe the psychology of diners. Kitchen Theory is a project that probes everything from the influence of sound on diner's perception of a meal to how best to persuade guests to embrace unexpected ingredients.
Around 4% of the populations are synaesthetes - individuals who experience a unique and spontaneous connection between senses, such as seeing a sure color when a specific musical note is played. The familiar multisensory nature of flavor - including sight, sound, smell, taste and touch - is different more of a "blending" of the senses. "
As for sound, in 2010 researchers from the food giant Unilever revealed that loud white noise can affect the flavor of food, sap both sweetness and saltiness, while Spence and his team have also explored associations between pitch and taste, finding sweetness and sourness to be correlated with high-pitched sounds, while bitterness could be augmented by low-pitched sounds.
In 2012, Cadbury revealed its new Dairy Milk bar, its previous hard edges replaced by a curvier arrangement. Complaints followed, most of them concerned not with the way it looked but how it tasted.
Other useful applications seem doable, with Spence eager to apply his insights to hospitals, finding ways to deal with the metallic taste of food often experienced by cancer patients, or make medication more appealing by experimenting with fake capsules produced in the kitchen. "It's just a bitter tasting pill - but from that we can see which shapes and colors and combinations and what names [to use]," he explains.
Spence even envision harnessing multisensory stimuli to help those with Alzheimer's. "We are thinking about olfactory alarm clocks that release the scent of meals three times a day to remind them to eat," he explains. And with an ageing population, employing all of our senses to strengthen our experience of flavor could make getting older more appetizing, too. "You've got hearing aids and glasses for the other senses but nothing for smell," Spence points out.