Hey, it's Dan here with another reheat for you. This one's all about the science of how sound affects the taste of food.

You think about your senses and food, of course you think about taste, smell, sight, even feel like texture. But as you'll hear in this

week's episode when I talk with Oxford researcher Charles Spence and my old

friend the Food Science Guru Kenji Lopez Alt, sound plays a key role in cooking and eating.

Remember as always if you have an episode you'd like us to reheat, send me a message at

hello at sporkful.com.

All right, on with the show.

Back in 2004, a researcher at Oxford named Charles Spence did a study that's now pretty famous. He had people eat potato chips in front of a microphone.

And while they ate they were also wearing headphones that were connected to that microphone. That way, as they ate the chips, they heard the

sound of the crunch in their headphones. Then he messed with what people heard.

When he made the crunch sound louder,

people claimed the chips were crispier, fresher, better.

Even though the chips were all identical,

they were pringles.

Here's Charles Spence.

This thing that we think where sort of feeling crispness or freshness in our mouth,

it's kind of a sense of touch. In fact, it's being influenced more than we realize by what we were hearing.

I think we were the sort of first to demonstrate in real time that we could, you know, make things

crunchy or crisper fresher simply by changing the sound and leaving the

actual texture the same.

Eating involves all your senses, but sound is the one sense you just don't think about as much when you eat.

Well, it turns out sound effects taste in a whole lot of ways.

...