Sounds

Music comes in many forms. Sometimes it’s about enjoying a live concert or listening to your favorite track on the way to work. Listening to music you like is all about expressing personal tastes, bringing back memories or fitting a moment’s mood.

At these venues, the melody is placed front and center. But, often music is composed to serve more practical purposes. Think about the music that is played at coffee shops. How often do you hear fast tempos and energetic lyrics? Music that is faster induces feelings of adrenaline, making you all hyped up. Calmer music might want to make you pause and take in the moment. What’s more, the kind of music playing at a coffee shop even changes a coffee’s taste! Sweet music diminishes the bitter notes in a cup fragments changed coffee’s temporal,perception of bitter in coffee, a result from the budding field of sonic seasoning research.

The use of music in food venues is an example of songs used to complement a meal’s or drink’s experience. Such music is often composed ambiently, using its layered tones to sound unobtrusive. It is meant to evoke atmospheres and be listened passively, while you are doing something else. Erik Satie composed some famous ambient songs that he called ‘furniture music’, such as ‘Gymnopedie No. 1’.

And then Brian Eno made an entire album of them: ‘Ambient 1: Music for Airports’. The songs in it are inspired by the music often found in waiting spaces, like a hospital, bank or airport terminal. They have a faux-soothing quality: they are meant to be interrupted and not be reflected upon. But they have a certain elegance to their bareness as well. There is no sense of movement, but the few repeating building blocks still create a satisfying musical experience. In a way, they reflect the fleetingness of airport travel.

This sense of sensory enhancement is also why Barilla puts out playlists to go with its pasta recipes. Such as these rigatonis and bucatinis.

Every flavor in its own way corresponds to a set of sounds which engage multiple senses at the same time. The composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer uses pitches and tempos from multiple instruments to make each song fit a dish. Using tomatoes as sweet bells, bacon as bass lines: making music from pasta, who would have thought?