When they talk about making sweet music, were they thinking of toffee? Aromatherapy comes in different forms and the way we process messages can affect our other senses. So if eating vanilla helps us enjoy pianos more, why should I disagree? Maybe it will help me better enjoy atonal music...?
This excerpt is from coolnews.com :
Altering the pitch and instruments used in background music can alter the way food tastes according to Oxford University. Anne-Sylvie Crisinel and Charles Spence of Oxford University conducted an experiment in which "each volunteer was given four pieces of toffee. While they were eating two of them, a sombre, low-pitched piece of music played on brass instruments. They consumed the other two, however, to the accompaniment of a higher-pitched piano piece."
Volunteers confirmed that the toffee eaten while listening to the low-pitched brass number tasted more bitter than the toffee consumed during the high-pitched piano piece. The findings build upon Anne-Sylvie's and Charles's earlier experiments, in which volunteers were asked to associate various aromas -- "ranging from apple to violet and wood smoke" -- with various pitches. In this experiment, "sweet and sour smells were rated as higher-pitched, smoky and woody ones as lower-pitched."
Still more specifically: "Blackberry and raspberry were very piano. Vanilla had elements of both piano and woodwind. Musk was strongly bass." It's not clear why this is, but Anne-Sylvie and Charles speculate that it's because people live "in a multisensory world and their brains tirelessly combine information from all sources to make sense, as it were, of what is going on around them." Humans, moreover, aren't alone in this: "Studies of the brains of mice show that regions involved in olfaction also react to sound." ~ Tim Manners, editor.
