Mixing the senses

-

There was an article in the Economist this week that strongly resonated with me. It concerned the "condition" of synaethsesia, whereby the signal from one sense is interpreted by another. The most famous example is that of seeing sound in colours. The Economist article reported a study into how people link taste with sound.

This is something that I have long experienced. Whilst I could never claim to be a good taster, whenever I try to describe a taste, it is usually in terms of a graphic equaliser or in the choir voices - soprano, alto, tenor, bass. The research described in the Economist article ascribes particular taste sensations to types of musical sound - bitterness with the higher strings (I can agree with that on so many levels!), vanilla was most associated with the woodwinds - and brass? Well, they got musk, which I don't fully understand.

Photo from Thara M Flickr page, Creative commons license


Not only that, it worked the other way around too, in that sounds could affect the way people tasted things. They ran the experiment of people eating toffee with varying high or low pitched music playing in the background. Indeed, that led to different descriptions of the taste, even though it was always the same toffee variety in all cases.

I cannot claim that there is any direct link betwen their findings and my own experiences, but it was a great feeling to see it all confirmed in print. I spoke about it with my wife that evening and found her questions personally enlightening. I had always felt that I had a very poor taste memory. I can't even imagine a Chardonnay wine "taste". Yet when she asked me about how I would describe various foods (or drink, especially this Madog's Ale I had recently) directly in terms of sound, I found it astoundingly easy to recall them (apart from water).

So for 2012 I will try to be more active in "saving" my impressions in those terms. In particular I want to see if I can recall the wines that we'll be drinking this year, or at least the archetypes. Let's see / taste / hear how I get on...

Comments

dioniso said…
Interesting exercise!
Musk!? I didn't even know what it is. I'll have to buy myself a sample. I can't ignore how my instrument tastes.
7 February 2012 at 14:07
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Brexit FMEA

-
Image
The Brexit pre-mortem: BFMEA Of all the engineering tools that I have encountered, the one that spans the widest spectrum of respect and scorn, hope and despair is the FMEA , the Failure Mode and Effects Analysis. Developed by the US military and NASA and gradually adopted by the automotive industry from the 1970s onwards, it is intended to highlight things that could go wrong before they do; it's also a way of collecting and tracking the evidence (models, test reports, etc) that shows that the nuts and bolts have been proven before putting them on a rocket - or, indeed, jettisoning a country out of the European Union. At its heart, the FMEA is a "what if?" analysis. Other methods are available, like the Potential Problem Analysis from Kepner-Tregoe. But I'm automotive, and the FMEA is a requirement in our field, so I've sketched up how a BFMEA (Brexit Failure Mode and Effects Analysis) might have been constructed and eventually look like. W
Read more

So nearly no longer Inbetween

-
Back in February I posted about the challenges of being between jobs . Now, following a sequence of online first and in-person second interviews and a remarkably tough choice between two very different offers from very different companies, I'm just a few days (including a bank-holiday weekend) from starting my new job at Pepperl+Fuchs . It's an exciting prospect, producing an intriguing mix of thoughts, feelings and excitement that I would like to just briefly reflect on here. On a purely practical level, the nerdy part of me is most interested in the commute. I'm genuine in wanting to continue to avoid using the car to get to work, having commuted by bike for much of my career. Cycling directly to work is alas no longer a regular option. I tried the ride the other day, and it took me an hour and a half to get there. The route along the river is actually quite pleasant, but while I'm sure I'll be able to improve the timing, it's still long. My main mode for the
Read more

Dropping drafts

-
I'm a pretty good sketcher of words and ideas, but a terrible completer of posts: making sure that the ideas make sense and connect properly, trying to get the wording and the feel right, trying to draw conclusions and lessons from whatever experiences or thoughts I am trying to describe; sometimes even deciding which service to post things on (a ridiculous situation, in all honesty) - that's all hard work, and sometimes I just don't feel that I have the energy to complete it. As a result, my pool of drafts begins to overflow and prevents me from really finishing. So, in the spirit of draining the pool and refreshing my perspectives, here's a dump of my most current drafts, cross-posted on Blogger and on my Micro.blog instance! Rethinking which services I should keep, and why, is something for another day. A review of Umberto Eco's The Island of the Day Before created 2023-09-06 This is a most typically Umberto Eco book, of an unknown, uncertain narrator reconstru
Read more