Among the more interesting results to come out of the field of research called gastrophysics is the discovery that what we taste can be influenced by musical pitch as well as perceived shapes. High pitch tastes “sweet,” bass notes taste “bitter”; round shapes feel sugary, jagged ones austere. This is the tidy story of crossmodal correspondences—the alleged universal mappings our senses make across sound, sight, and taste. But tidy stories rarely survive contact with actual mouths. The evidence is impressive. But it’s also messier than the slogans would suggest..
Decades of experiments show reliable tendencies to match features across senses—size with pitch, brightness with elevation, timbre with taste, and so on. This is not a one-off lab quirk but a broad empirical pattern, documented across many modalities and tasks. And specifically for food and drink, people do associate auditory features (pitch, timbre) with tastes in systematic ways, which is why “sonic seasoning” keeps showing up in restaurants and marketing decks.
I’ve had great fun pairing wine with music. In my experience, it’s remarkable how music can influence how a wine tastes. But “reliable” is not “universal.” Some people seem to get it; others don’t.
Cross-cultural studies complicate the picture: when you ask large samples in China, India, Malaysia, and the U.S. to pair colors, shapes, and textures with the five basic tastes, the patterns diverge. Some mappings are shared; others flip or fade, and confidence varies by country. Cultural learning matters. More recent work comparing multiple societies reaches the same conclusion: there are correspondences, but the strength and even direction of specific pairings differ across groups. Treat any single “sweet = pink and round” chart as provincial unless you’ve tested the audience you’re designing for.
Zoom in further and the cracks widen. Individual-difference research shows that people vary in how strongly they feel a given mapping (say, curvature with “sweet”). Some are highly sensitive to these cross-sensory cues; others barely register them. If you rely on one correspondence to steer expectation—on a package, a plate, or a soundtrack—you should expect uneven results at the table.
What about stability over time—do these mappings stick? A recent study on taste–shape associations suggests many correspondences are indeed temporally stable within individuals, which is encouraging for anyone building experiences around them. But “some stability” is not “immunity”; stability can coexist with cultural drift, contextual modulation, and learning.
And then there’s the question of why correspondences exist at all—a point of live debate. Are they grounded in shared neural coding, learned statistical regularities in the world (bananas are both yellow and sweet), or piggybacking on language (“high” notes with items “high” in space)? The most careful theorists caution against one-explanation-fits-all; different correspondences likely have different origins, and the field faces challenges that should keep grand claims modest. There are plenty of positive findings, but mixed patterns and a need to attend to group differences.
What follows from this, for cooks, designers, and critics? Three guardrails:
- Map, don’t mythologize. Correspondences are helpful biases, not laws. Use them as starting points not as universal recipes.
- Test locally. If your guests or customers aren’t the population described in the paper you’re citing, assume the effect size could shrink, shift, or reverse. Run small, situated tastings before you build a whole experience on a crossmodal cue. (Your diners are your dataset.)
- Remember time and sequence. Taste is temporal. The order of presentation, context, and attention reshape the effects correspondences aim to exploit. A “sweet” soundtrack may nudge judgments of a dessert—until the room noise rises, the lighting changes, or the dish’s acidity reframes the bite.
I think crossmodal correspondences are real enough to respect but fickle enough to mistrust any broad generalizations. They offer designers and chefs useful information for composing multisensory experiences, but the information is dialectal, not universal. The smarter posture is skeptical pragmatism—learn the common patterns, then validate them where you cook and for whom you cook. The promise isn’t a master key to flavor; it’s a well-thumbed map, annotated in pencil.
Exploring the Philosophy of Food and Wine 