Grapes are a fun food to eat. The tiny spheres seem so smooth and simple—little flavorless orbs. Then they burst between your teeth with sweet, juicy goop. But what if, each time you touched a grape, it also made a little “boop” sound? And as you chewed, you heard bubbles popping in your ears?
That’s the delightful premise behind Sonic Seasoning, the graduation project of RCA student Mengtian Zhang. Inspired by ASMR—the tingling sensation people can get from certain sounds (and most recently, a slew of therapeutic YouTube videos)—it’s a plate and cutlery set that adds all sorts of sounds to the foods you eat, with the hopes of enhancing their flavor.
“I can feel the texture and flavor of food such as crunchiness and freshness behind the phone screen,” says Zhang. “So I was thinking, Could we use sound and visual effects to enhance our taste and build expectations before eating?”
What Zhang designed in response is the set of plates and cutlery you see here. Each is connected to various sensors to measure the food it is touching. The sensors send electrical signals to a processor, which plays the impulses like notes on a synthesizer. All of these connected pieces of tableware can actually create a complete circuit as a bite of food enters your mouth, so the system knows when you actually take a bite to play accompanying sound.
When Zhang began working on the project, she thought it would simply be a more playful way to eat. But through her research, she is convinced there’s something more here. While you don’t often think of sound as a critical component of flavor, research has shown that it is. One study found that playing certain pitches can actually increase the umami or bitter flavors within food. Another discovered that people perceived stale potato chips as crispy if they heard a crunch with their bite. “I think the whole eating experience should be full of fun at first, and then people will focus on the sense of taste changing subtly with sound,” says Zhang.
