Abstract
Our study explores artistic strategies for forming connections between sound/music and food to create novel meanings and emotional experiences for individual consumers. Building on ‘unusual ingredients’, our multisensory project designing music/soundscapes to modulate food and drink perception, this paper provides a sensory-led model for cross-domain artistic practice, in order to identify, apply and catalogue sensory interrelationships in creative settings. In support of our thesis, we integrate three theoretical models of sensory perception: neuroscientific accounts from gastrophysics based on study of phenomena such as ‘crossmodal correspondence’ between hearing and gustation; ecological perception theory based on ‘affordances’ between objects and users; and research into 4E cognition, which postulates embodied, enacted, embedded and extended qualities of perception. Based on our adaptation of these theories, we show how sensory perception of food can be extended through appropriate music composition strategies, and vice versa. We also offer a proposed taxonomy for these strategies and outline a sensory model for cross-domain artistic practice, showing how creative decisions are navigated within a framework of possibilities based on the material properties and contextual associations of selected materials in each domain. Different frameworks thereby ‘afford’ different sensory interrelationships between domains. The intention is that, through creating ‘unusual’ ways to experience food, we can enable a reappraisal of our relationship towards it; instead of viewing food as a passive, functional resource, we highlight how eating and drinking represent active exchanges of matter and meaning, which connect us to wider social and environmental ecologies.
Presenters
Jacob Thompson BellPrincipal Lecturer, Postgraduate Studies (Music), Leeds Conservatoire, United Kingdom
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2021 Special Focus–Making Sense from Taste: Quality, Context, Community
KEYWORDS
Music, Food, Multisensory Perception, Extended Mind, Affordances, Gastrophysics, Crossmodal Correspondence
