This podcast episode features an interview with Drs Erik Fooladi, Anu Hopia, and Antti-Ville Kärjä. In this episode we talk about Food and Music. Their interconnected work sheds light on how this field of research is a playground where disciplines can come together and bridge art and science.
Podcast episode host: Jennifer Whitaker
Interviewees: Erik Fooladi, Anu Hopia, and Antti-Ville Kärjä
Podcast theme music: Laura Bruno
Script editor: Kathy Dobson
Script editor & project manager: Myriam Durocher
Transcript
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JW: Hello Everyone! You’re listening to Food Matters’ podcast series, brought to you by Carleton University. My name is Jennifer and I’ll be your host for this episode.
I recently had the opportunity to meet with professors Erik Fooladi from Volda University College, Norway; Anu Hopia from the University of Turku, Finland; and Antti-Ville Kärjä from the University of the Arts, Helsinki. All three presented at the Food Matters and Materialities Conference.
Here is what came out of these interesting conversations!
JW: The three professors were a part of a panel called “Food and Music as Transdisciplinary Sensory Cultures”. Each of the panelists come from different academic disciplines themselves from Chemistry to Ethnomusicology. But all share a common interest in food and music. When I read the biographies of the presenters, I was surprised to note that Dr. Anu Hopia has an interesting background in science. It made me curious, and I wanted to know more about her fascinating career trajectory. Here is what led her to researching taste association and music.
AH: Originally, I’m a food chemist. I have been working with different fields in food science. And during the last 10 or 12 years, I’ve been focusing especially on different aspects of our food preferences and food choices. I did work a lot, many years, with food and health. Especially the health aspects of food. We did clinical studies on health effects of food and diet. I felt very strongly that actually, when we talk about food and when we prioritize different aspects of food, if we only focus on health and disease, we really do injustice to our food. Then when I started in this position as a professor in food development, I actually said that I want to take food liking and preferences, and the sensory aspects of food into focus as well.
JW: During her presentation at the Conference, Dr Hopia discussed how the process of eating – from preparation to consumption – is a multi-sensory act where all five senses are involved. She explained that sense modalities are constantly interacting, and they can influence our perception of food. She gave me a few examples of the influence that soundscapes can have on our sense of taste:
AH: There’s a very interesting study on how airplane soundscapes, which is a sort of low motor, that is the soundscape that has been noticed to suppress sweetness, suppress saltiness, but it has no effect on the umami taste. It’s an interesting observation, I don’t know if anyone has done a scientific study on it, but – why do drinks like a bloody Mary, it’s really popular on the airplane, why is it so? A bloody Mary is based on tomato juice and tomato is really rich in umami taste. And really food has been shown to, for example, the saltiness of food on an airplane needs to be higher because it doesn’t taste the same.
JW: This connection could be coincidental, but Dr. Hopia explained how music and soundscapes can be intentionally constructed to affect culinary experiences. Isn’t that fascinating?
While listening to the panel Dr. Hopia was part of, it was explained that we often use adjectives such as crisp, sweet, dry, light, and soft when describing food. These verbal associations can also be translated into musical patterns.
To demonstrate how these adjectives can sound, Dr. Erik Fooladi presented findings from a study that he conducted. In the study, music education students were asked to compose and perform short musical pieces to represent one of two specific flavour sensations: lemon or wheat bun.
Let’s have a listen to four pieces representing either lemon or wheat bun. I’ll leave it up to you to decide which sensation each piece represents.
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JW: For Dr. Fooladi, this project is a demonstration of interdisciplinary learning. A place where science and arts converge is in ‘cross modal correspondence’. Here is Dr. Fooladi explaining this further:
EF: Cross-modal correspondence is, we’re talking about, sensory modalities. We have five senses, unless you start talking about the sixth sense. So we have vision, hearing, smell, we have somato-sensation which is touch, with the skin, and taste. When we sense something, for instance if you put something in your mouth, you would fire off several of the senses at the same time. While you’re sitting there, you’re probably smelling something, hearing something, seeing something – if you have chewing gum or something in your mouth you might be tasting something as well, or if you just brushed your teeth, or whatever. As human beings we’re always taking in the world outside or around us with all our senses. But the thing is, when we take in these sensations, in our brains and in our bodies, these are mixed into a sort of cocktail. And sometimes – well, they are always mixed, but sometimes, we might have a single sensory experience that fires off several senses you might put something in your mouth and you both taste it and feel the texture for example, or you might hear the crunching. These senses might affect each other. For instance, what researchers have seen is that if you serve a drink that is dyed red, and the same drink – both of them are slightly sweet, and then you dye one red with a colour that has no taste, and then you serve it to someone – majority of people will actually say that the red one is sweeter. The English chocolate company, Cadbury, they have a chocolate bar that is made up of rectangles. They changed the shape of the chocolate making it round pieces that you can break off. And suddenly they received a lot of complaints that asked why they had made their chocolate was sweeter. Whereas they had not made it sweeter, they used the same recipes, but the customers experienced it as sweeter. So you could go describing many, many experiences that one sensory modality actually affects your perception in another sensory modality. So that’s crossmodal correspondence.
JW: Dr Fooladi’s answer triggered my curiosity. I wanted to know more about why understanding multi-sensory perception is valuable and how taste can serve as an important tool when researching. Here is what he shared with me:
EF: To solve major issues in society and in the world, we need to pull together, we need to work across disciplines using maybe interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary or transdisciplinary approaches to complex questions. Food, meaning either cooking, or eating, or both, are by nature multi or inter or transdisciplinary. If you want to study them and take the food seriously and not reduce food to only Chemistry from my perspective. If I said all food is chemistry, that in one sense, would be correct. But it is a reductionism that is severe, and I would take away many aspects of food by reducing it to chemistry. So what this means is either cooking or eating, or both provides a very suitable and fun playground for studying transdisciplinarity or interdisciplinarity. So then, you can go into food and have a look at food from different perspectives or place yourself as the food and look outwards, towards different disciplines. Then you can say, ok, how or what happens when these disciplines try to work together? Where are the possibilities? What do you know that I don’t know? What does person B know that person A doesn’t know? Which methods are used in different disciplines? And then when these meet, necessarily you would have power relations. And then the question is: how the power relations are played out? And which possibilities are there, and which frictions arise? Which challenges do you meet? Is it so that everyone can play altogether and be happy? Or are there paradoxes or are there dilemmas that are actually very difficult to solve when different disciplines and their world views meet? So, food, cooking, and eating are actually natural playgrounds to study.
JW: The theme of interdisciplinarity was threaded through each presentation of the panel, “Food and Music as Transdisciplinary Sensory Cultures”. Food and music can help us think critically about crossing disciplines and challenging normative perceptions of our senses. And that’s why Dr. Kärjä has developed an interest in studying food and taste in relation to his field of study, which is ethnomusicology.
AK: I define it as the cultural study of music and approaching music as a kind of cultural, political, and economic phenomenon. Never simply a sound, although the importance of sound is crucial there also that we also need to sort of pay attention to the sounds that we do music or when we talk about music. I’m interested, nowadays, in questions of olfactory and meaning making. Food is very central there, and these multi-sensory issues are quite interesting, not only because of multi-sensory issues like food involving the kind of various senses or all of them basically and then music in many ways it’s always a tactile thing when you play music or sing you whistle or whatever you do, or when you listen to it, there kinds of corporeality’s and material realities involved that people maybe don’t often think about.
And then when I started rethinking this whole thing, I actually realized that I’m not talking about food and music, I’m talking about ethnicity here and that’s how this idea of those two realms then come to construct what we think is ethnicity. Well, this is a basic tenant of ethnomusicology in the sense that we are all ethnic, that there’s always ethnicity involved in some form or another. And then it’s more because of the loose use of the term and also deliberate misinterpretations, deliberate and politically oriented use that it is taken as kind of synonym for something that’s not mainstream or it’s in a minority position. So, in terms of ethnicity, its politics. I think that the key point there is to recognize or start from, the fact, that we are all ethnic. And then, think about, for example, in the context of how food and music, how then might we construct, reconstruct, deconstruct the prevailing ways of thinking about certain foods or ethnicity in general?
JW: Dr. Kärjä also emphasized how studying food and music can challenge the dominance of visual information in research and in contemporary culture more broadly. In his presentation, he advocated for a “democracy of senses”, and so I asked him why this is important.
AK: I don’t know if democracy is really the right word there but maybe it’s more about sort of acknowledging and recognizing that we are actually multi-sensory organisms as human beings and then we reproduce knowledge on the basis of all the kinds of stimuli that we get from different sources. I think that there’s some evidence that in terms of the senses when compared to other animals, especially other mammals, our sense of vision is dominant. So, our sense of smell is way lower or poorer than for example, dogs, which don’t see too well but can smell quite well. I think to some extent it’s more about the way in which even for a person like me, I’m wearing [glasses], when I take them off, the world looks literally quite different to me and there are lots of people who don’t even see as much as I do. I think it’s just a very primal reaction and impolite in a way, that we take for granted that everybody can read the kind of visual writing and images and so forth and this has especially come forth in these disciplinary contexts.
JW: I learned a lot while listening to Dr.’s Fooladi, Hopia, and Kärjä fascinating presentations about the possibilities that food and music offer as a playground for transdisciplinary collaboration between arts and science.
I learned through listening to their work about the added value of approaching food and taste as multi-sensorial experiences, which helps challenge the dominance of visual culture when it comes to thinking about food.
I’d like to thank Dr. Erik Fooladi, Dr. Anu Hopia, and Dr. Antti-Ville Kärjä for their participation in the 2021 Food Matters and Materialities Conference and for sharing more of their insights with me.
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JW: This podcast was brought to you by Carleton University. My name is Jennifer Whitaker, and I was your host for today’s episode. Thank you to Kathy Dobson and Myriam Durocher, project managers and editors for this show as well as to Laura Bruno for the creation of the theme music. You can find more of Food Matters’ podcasts on the Food Matters website.