To Measure the Taste of Food, Listen to Your Taste Buds
What does coffee sound like? Maybe…a coffee pot making coffee. Or perhaps the Folger’s jingle. But that’s not what the taste of coffee actually sound like. What is that sound—the taste of coffee? It’s not just a question for synesthetes. Researchers are trying to use sound to quantify taste. Edible Geography writes about the challenges that food scientists have had in really measuring what something tastes like and about a new idea for that sense: n a paper to be published in June 2013 in the journal Food Hydrocolloids, scientist George A. Van Aken of NIZO, a Dutch food research company, reveals a new method of measuring mouthfeel: the wonderfully named “acoustic tribology.” Van Aken took a tiny contact microphone, packed it in polyethylene to keep it dry, and secured it behind a test subject’s upper front incisor teeth in order to record the acoustic signal produced by the varying vibrations of their papillae as their tongue rubbed against their palate. In short, Van Aken’s device mea