A sweet melody, an even sweeter bite.
A researcher from the University of Bristol has created a song that really manages to make the chocolate better if you listen to it while you eat it.
Dr. Natalie Hyacinth, expert on sounds and also composer, has put together a piece of music after decades of studies that demonstrate how the tone, rhythm and shade of music can deceive the brain and make us perceive sweets as more intense and greedy.
The trick lies in what scientists call “multisensory integration”: the senses mix and strengthen each other.
If you combine the chocolate (or a sweetened fruit) with a right melody, the brain transforms the dessert into a kind of concert. It is as if your senses made a jam session.
From the research it came out that the soft and velvety melodies, in greater shade, make the chocolate look sweeter and creamier. The most pungent notes, on the other hand, accentuate their bitter. The fast rhythms? Better to leave them to a fast food.
The Galaxy Chocolate brand wanted to test this science by creating a 90 second track together with the researcher, called Sweetest Melody: 78 BPM, designed to melt in the ears at the same time when the chocolate melts in the mouth.
Piano for sweetness, arches for softness and harp to accompany everything with fluidity. The song can already be heard on YouTube and Spotify.
Hyacinth explained that “enjoying chocolate can be a multisensory experience that goes beyond flavor and involves all the senses”.
And he added that “the power of music in increasing the pleasure of chocolate is something exciting”.
The idea was also born thanks to a survey on 2,000 British: 37% said that a dessert is essential for moments of personal relaxation, while 56% raise music to unplug.
According to the director of the Galaxy brand, Romi Mackiewicz, the goal is to transform chocolate into “a symphony for the senses”.
It is no isolated case: music is now often used as a medicine for mood. This spring, for example, was spoken of Weightlessan eight -minute ambient song by the English Band Marconi Union, called a real sound sedative.
The piece was designed specifically to lower stress, and science confirms it: in a study, the people connected to biometric sensors saw the anxiety drop by 65% while listening to Weightless trying to solve complex puzzles.
Natalie Hyacinth’s work is part of the wake of Charles Spence, the psychologist of Oxford who has been studying how sounds and colors have been transforming the flavor of food for years.
Charles Spence is an experimental psychologist of Oxford who has revolutionized the way we think about food. With its experiments of “multisensory gastronomy” it has shown that we do not eat only with the mouth, but also with eyes and ears: from the chips that seem more crunchy if the noise is more acute, to the sweeter strawberry mousse in white dishes, up to the candies that change flavor depending on music. A true pioneer in showing how our senses intertwine at the table.
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