The Invisible Ingredient: How Sound Shapes What We Taste

How do you think about your senses? You probably put them in neat categories: sight, sound, taste, smell, touch. But do you think about the interplay and overlap between them, and how that interaction shapes your perception of the world?

Crossmodal science is preoccupied with exactly that. It’s the study of how different sensory modalities interact and influence one another, and when it comes to taste, most of us would be surprised by what the research reveals. Sound isn’t just filling space. It’s shaping expectations, framing experiences, and changing what we perceive, often before we realize it’s happening.

Sound is a flavor enhancer

Studies have shown that sound is one of the primary fast tracks to our emotions. It reaches the emotional centers of our brain significantly faster than visual input, meaning it often sets the stage for how we interpret everything that follows. From the sounds we hear interacting with our environment, to the functional tones that play as we perform actions on user interfaces, to music playing in the background of a restaurant, sound isn’t just filling a space. It’s shaping our expectations, framing an experience, and influencing our perception before we even realize it.

Professor Charles Spence, Head of the Crossmodal Research Laboratory at Oxford University, has spent decades documenting this phenomenon. His work has demonstrated, repeatedly and rigorously, that specific sonic properties (like pitch, tempo, timbre, distortion, and articulation) map to specific flavor qualities with surprising consistency across cultures and individuals.

Higher pitches, legato articulation, and consonant harmonies tend to correspond with sweetness. Lower pitches, sharp transients, and dissonance are associated with bitterness. Faster tempos, staccato rhythm, harsh sounds and dissonance correlate with sourness. These aren’t arbitrary associations. They appear to be wired into the architecture of human perception, a set of crossmodal correspondences that most people share, whether they know it or not.

The practical implication? Play the right sound while someone eats, and you can measurably change their perception of the flavor. Sound, it turns out, is an invisible ingredient.

From the lab to the real world

When Steve Keller, Studio Resonate’s Sonic Strategy Director, first read through the academic literature in 2016, he noticed a gap. While sonic seasonings had been uncovered for sweetness, bitterness, and sourness, no one had explored the relationship between sound and spiciness (what researchers call “piquancy”).

What sounds spicy? That question was enough to prompt Steve to join forces with Professor Spence and Dr. Qian Janice Wang (now Associate Professor and Head of Design and Consumer Behavior at the University of Copenhagen) on a quest to discover the sonic seasonings for spice. 

They began with an experiment teasing out the sonic building blocks of heat: participants listened to short musical clips that varied along a single auditory parameter at a time (e.g., pitch, tempo, distortion, articulation, harmony) and identified which samples felt most spicy. There were clear correlations: higher pitches, faster tempos, distorted timbres, and sharp attacks were the signature elements, all traits associated with high arousal, likely reflecting the elevated physical sensation of consuming spicy food.

Sound is a sonic flavor amplifier

When those elements were combined into a spicy soundscape, the real test began: could it actually impact perception?

The short answer was—yes. First, it changed expectations. Participants anticipated more heat when they heard the spicy soundtrack before tasting a dish. And when the level of spice aligned with those expectations, they rated the same food as significantly spicier compared to when it was paired with sweet music, white noise, or silence. The changes had little to do with what participants put in their mouths and everything to do with what was put in their ears. 

That’s the power of crossmodal perception in action. Sound becomes a sonic flavor amplifier, capable of dialing heat up or down without touching the dish.

The research was published in Food Quality and Preference and later featured in Frontiers in Psychology as part of a broader review of how sonic seasoning has been applied commercially, from Cadbury chocolate, to Chivas whiskey, to a Propel fitness drink activation where crossmodal research informed bespoke soundscapes that attendees blended in real time through an interactive interface. In each case, the same principle held: intentional sound, grounded in perceptual science, moved the needle on taste.

Why this matters for brands

Most brands treat audio as atmosphere, something to fill a space or signal a mood. Crossmodal science suggests it can do something far more specific: actively shape how a product is perceived before, during, and after the moment of consumption.

This has implications well beyond background music in a restaurant. Sonic branding, advertising soundscapes, the audio environments built into brand experiences—all of these are operating on the same perceptual machinery. And they’re doing so whether brands are paying attention or not. The question isn’t whether sound is influencing your audience. It always is. The question is whether you’re being intentional about how.

What makes crossmodal science particularly valuable for audio-first thinkers is its specificity. This isn’t a soft argument for “the power of music.” It’s a body of evidence that maps particular sonic parameters to particular perceptual outcomes, consistently enough to be designed around. You can compose for sweetness. You can score for intensity. You can build a soundscape that primes expectation before a consumer ever encounters your product.

That’s because sound is never just sound. It’s expectation. It’s context. It’s emotion. And in the right hands, it’s flavor, too.

Curious how crossmodal science translates into real creative strategy? Check out our case study on how Studio Resonate turned these findings into a culturally defining campaign for Sprite.

Crossmodal science in action