Food product-extrinsic sounds (i.e., those auditory stimuli that are not linked directly to a food or beverage product, or its packaging) have been shown to exert a significant influence over various aspects of food perception and consumer behaviour, often operating outside of conscious awareness. In this review, we summarise the latest evidence concerning the various ways in which what we hear can influence what we taste. According to one line of empirical research, background noise interferes with tasting, due to attentional distraction. A separate body of marketing-relevant research demonstrates that music can be used to bias consumers’ food perception, judgments, and purchasing/consumption behaviour in various ways. Some of these effects appear to be driven by the arousal elicited by loud music as well as the entrainment of people’s behaviour to the musical beat. However, semantic priming effects linked to the type and style of music are also relevant. Another route by which music influences food perception comes from the observation that our liking/preference for the music that we happen to be listening to carries over to influence our hedonic judgments of what we are tasting. A final route by which hearing influences tasting relates to the emerging field of ‘sonic seasoning’. A developing body of research now demonstrates that people often rate tasting experiences differently when listening to soundtracks that have been designed to be (or are chosen because they are) congruent with specific flavour experiences (e.g., when compared to when listening to other soundtracks, or else when tasting in silence). Taken together, such results lead to the growing realization that the crossmodal influences of music and noise on food perception and consumer behaviour may have some important if, as yet, unrecognized implications for public health.

We introduce a novel methodology to assess the influence of the emotion induced by listening to music on the consumer’s multisensory tasting experience. These crossmodal effects were analyzed when two contrasting music tracks (positive vs negative emotion) were presented to consumers while tasting beer. The results suggest that the emotional reactions triggered by the music influenced specific aspects of the multisensory tasting experience. Participants liked the beer more, and rated it as tasting sweeter, when listening to music associated with positive emotion. The same beer was rated as more bitter, with higher alcohol content, and as having more body, when the participants listened to music associated with negative emotion. Moreover, participants were willing to pay 7–8% more for the beer that was tasted while they listened to positive music. This novel methodology was subsequently replicated with two different styles of beer. These results are discussed along with practical implications concerning the way in which music can add significant value to how a consumer responds to a brand.

Background: Shape can play an important role in our perception of food. In this study, the consequences of crossmodal correspondences between shape and taste on the expected and actual experience of eating chocolate were evaluated. Participants were given two identical dark chocolates differing only in terms of their shape (round or angular) and then rated their expectations of sweetness, bitterness, creaminess and liking. Subsequently, they rated their experience of those attributes on tasting the chocolates. Repeated-measures multivariate analyses (RM-MANOVA) of variance were conducted to assess the role of chocolate shape and cacao content on expected and post-taste chocolate ratings. In addition, we assessed the differences between expected and post-taste ratings for each chocolate shape. Results: The results revealed that the shape of the chocolate significantly influenced expected sweetness, bitterness and creaminess. By contrast, it had no significant effect on post-tasting ratings. The round chocolates were judged to be less sweet, more bitter, less creamy and liked less than expected, whereas the angular chocolates were judged to be slightly more creamy than expected. Conclusions: The theory of assimilation and contrast is outlined as one plausible mechanism behind the differences between expectation and the actual taste experience. Implications for food product design and directions for future research are discussed.