The taste of music

B. MESZ ; M. A. TREVISAN; M. SIGMAN

PERCEPTION

PION LTD

Año: 2011 vol. 40 p. 209 - 219

0301-0066

Zarlino, one of the most important music theorists of the XVI century, described the minorconsonances as `sweet´ (dolci) and `soft´ (soavi) (Zarlino 1558/1983, in On theModes New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 1983). Hector Berlioz, in his Treatise on Modern Instrumentation and Orchestra-tion (London: Novello, 1855), speaks about the `small acid-sweet voice´ of the oboe. In line withthis tradition of describing musical concepts in terms of taste words, recent empirical studies havefound reliable associations between taste perception and low-level sound and musical parameters,like pitch and phonetic features. Here we investigated whether taste words elicited consistent musicalrepresentations by asking trained musicians to improvise on the basis of the four canonical tastewords: sweet, sour, bitter, and salty. Our results showed that, even in free improvisation, taste wordselicited very reliable and consistent musical patterns: `bitter´ improvisations are low-pitched and legato(without interruption between notes), `salty´ improvisations are staccato (notes sharply detached fromeach other), `sour´ improvisations are high-pitched and dissonant, and `sweet´ improvisations areconsonant, slow, and soft. Interestingly, projections of the improvisations of taste words to musicalspace (a vector space defined by relevant musical parameters) revealed that, in musical space,improvisations based on different taste words were nearly orthogonal or opposite. Decodingmethods could classify binary choices of improvisations (ie identify the improvisation word fromthe melody) at performance of around 80%öwell above chance. In a second experiment we investi-gated the mapping from perception of music to taste words. Fifty-seven non-musical experts listenedto a fraction of the improvisations. We found that listeners classified with high performance thetaste word which had elicited the improvisation. Our results, furthermore, show that associationsof taste and music go beyond basic sensory attributes into the domain of semantics, and open anew venue of investigation to understand the origins of these consistent taste ^ musical patterns.