Sound Predicts Meaning: Cross-Modal Associations Between Formant Frequency and Emotional Tone in Stanzas

Marketing sonified fragrance: Designing soundscapes for scent

Auditory branding is undoubtedly becoming more important across a range of sectors. One area, in particular, that has recently seen significant growth concerns the introduction of music and soundscapes that have been specifically designed to match a particular scent (what one might think of as "audio scents" or "sonic scents"). This represents an exciting new approach to the sensory marketing of fragrance and for industries with strategic sensory goals, such as cosmetics. Crucially, techniques such as the semantic differential technique, as well as the emerging literature on crossmodal correspondences, offer both a mechanistic understanding of, and a practical framework for, those wishing to rigorously align the connotative meaning and conceptual/emotional/sensory associations of sound and scent. These developments have enabled those working in the creative industries to start moving beyond previously popular approaches to matching, or translating between the senses, that were traditionally often based on the idiosyncratic phenomenon of synaesthesia, toward a more scientific approach while nevertheless still enabling/requiring a healthy dose of artistic inspiration. In this narrative historical review, we highlight the various approaches to the systematic matching of sound with scent and review the various marketing activations that have appeared in this space recently.

Inducing Novel Sound-Taste Correspondences via an Associative Learning Task

The interest in crossmodal correspondences, including those involving sounds and involving tastes, has experienced rapid growth in recent years. However, the mechanisms underlying these correspondences are not well understood. In the present study (N = 302), we used an associative learning paradigm, based on previous literature using simple sounds with no consensual taste associations (i.e., square and triangle wave sounds at 200 Hz) and taste words (i.e., sweet and bitter), to test the influence of two potential mechanisms in establishing sound-taste correspondences and investigate whether either learning mechanism could give rise to new and long-lasting associations. Specifically, we examined an emotional mediation account (i.e., using sad and happy emoji facial expressions) and a transitive path (i.e., sound-taste correspondence being mediated by color, using red and black colored squares). The results revealed that the associative learning paradigm mapping the triangle wave tone with a happy emoji facial expression induced a novel crossmodal correspondence between this sound and the word sweet. Importantly, we found that this novel association was still present two months after the experimental learning paradigm. None of the other mappings, emotional or transitive, gave rise to any significant associations between sound and taste. These findings provide evidence that new crossmodal correspondences between sounds and tastes can be created by leveraging the affective connection between both dimensions, helping elucidate the mechanisms underlying these associations. Moreover, these findings reveal that these associations can last for several weeks after the experimental session through which they were induced.

ERPs reveal an iconic relation between sublexical phonology and affective meaning

Classical linguistic theory assumes that formal aspects, like sound, are not internally related to the meaning of words. However, recent research suggests language might code affective meaning such as threat and alert sublexically. Positing affective phonological iconicity as a systematic organization principle of the German lexicon, we calculated sublexical affective values for sub-syllabic phonological word segments from a large-scale affective lexical German database by averaging valence and arousal ratings of all words any phonological segment appears in. We tested word stimuli with either consistent or inconsistent mappings between lexical affective meaning and sublexical affective values (negative-valence/high-arousal vs. neutral-valence/low-arousal) in an EEG visual-lexical-decision task. A mismatch between sublexical and lexical affective values elicited an increased N400 response. These results reveal that systematic affective phonological iconicity - extracted from the lexicon - impacts the extraction of lexical word meaning during reading.