Five Sense of Flavor: Sound
Your sense of sound is the lessor of your senses when it comes to tasting food. Taste, touch and smell contribute mostly to your flavor experience, but sound does play a small part.
Sound falls into the category of expectation. Its main role is to associate sounds with foods, like freshness or crunchiness. This also helps us determine spoiled and raw foods. A good example would be a bag of potato chips. A fresh potato chip has a wonderful crunchy sound to it. A stale chip has a much softer crunch and a lot less snap. Because we’ve all grown up eating chips we are practically experts at eating them. We know what to expect when we bite down, and when don’t hear the desired effect (we don’t hear the sound) the taste of the chip isn’t very good. We’ve grown so accustom to certain sounds with foods that eating that bag of chips with the sound turned off would be, well, awkward. Like the time you were running to the restroom at work and – in a hurry – sent the wrong text to the wrong person. Then felt locked out of the bathroom, only to find out it’s a push and not a pull. Yeah, just like that.
Sound also helps in our association and attraction to food. Take, for instance, the popping of fried bacon or the sound of sizzling steak. These types of sounds prepare us, and almost entice us, for the food we are about to eat.
Below is a list of sounds that we associate with foods:
- Fizz of a soda
- Crack of carrot
- Crispy fries
- Crunch of an apple
- Sizzling of meat on the grill
- Ungluing sound a baked good when pulled apart
Maybe sound doesn’t have quite as big of an influence as the other senses, but it does add its own touch to enhance our food experience.