6 Minute English / Sonic seasoning

Note: This is not a word-for-word transcript.

Hello. This is 6 Minute English from BBC Learning English. I m Neil.

And I m Beth. There are some well-known English expressions that make a link between seeing and eating. Your eyes are bigger than your belly means you have taken more food than you can eat; and the saying you eat with your eyes first means that food seems more desirable when it looks good on the plate.

But seeing isn t the only sense involved in tasting food - in fact, it may not even be the most important. First, you see your favourite bacon sandwich, then comes its delicious smell, quickly followed by the crunchy feel and salty taste as you take a bite.

Now scientists are learning more about the power of another of our senses sound and how affects our sense of taste. Sonic seasoning is the idea that when you hear certain sounds or music they can enhance one flavour or another in the food you re eating. In this programme we'll be eating with our ears as we investigate the link between sound and our tastebuds. And, as usual, we'll be learning some useful new vocabulary as well.

But first I have a question for you, Beth. The idea that sounds influence taste might seem strange, but the food-processing companies that produce some of our most familiar food and drinks have long known that sounds equal sales. In the UK, for example, the chocolate company, Cadbury, hired the London Contemporary Orchestra to perform classical music tunes symbolising each flavour of their Dairy Milk chocolates. So, which background sound did whisky-makers, Singletons, used to advertise their scotch whisky? Was it:

a) jazz music?b) bagpipes playing? or,c) birds tweeting?

I ll guess they used some smooth jazz music.

OK, Beth. I'll reveal the answer later in the programme. Charles Spence is professor of experimental psychology at Oxford University. After years studying how our brains process information, he believes sound plays a much bigger role in how we taste our food than we think, something he explained to Mike Johnson, presenter of BBC World Service programme, The Food Chain:

In general how big a contribution do you think these sounds, and sound generally, actually makes to how we perceive food compared to the more obvious senses, of course, of sight and smell?