by Zoë Pollock
How noises amplify tastes:
Charles Spence is multisensory researcher in London, who has been messing around with how sounds modify flavor. "We’ve shown that if you take something with competing flavors, something like bacon-and-egg ice cream, we were able to change people’s perception of the dominant flavor—is it bacon, or egg?—simply by playing sizzling bacon sounds or farmyard chicken noises."
This might sound crazy, but the otherworldly ice cream makes one thing clear: The sound of food matters. So does the sound of the packaging and the atmospheric sounds we hear when we’re eating. We’re all synesthesiates when we sit down to dinner.
On a similar topic, Cassandra Willyard considers people who are highly sensitive to mealtime sounds:
My mom has always had weird issues with noise. Dinnertime was the worst. Forks scraped plates, mouths slurped, teeth crunched, lips smacked even when they didn’t mean to—something was always bothering my mother. I used to think she was just easily bugged.
But last week my mom forwarded me a New York Times article about a disorder called misophonia. The article begins like this: “For people with a condition that some scientists call misophonia, mealtime can be torture. The sounds of other people eating — chewing, chomping, slurping, gurgling — can send them into an instantaneous, blood-boiling rage.” She added a short note: “I think I have some form of this."
The Dish 