Assessing Oenosthesia: blending wine and sound 

By Jo Burzynska

Recent developments in neuroscience and psychology have confirmed what many artists have long intuited, that our senses are connected. Research into crossmodal correspondences - the universal tendency of a sensory feature in one modality to be matched with one from another sensory modality – has highlighted a strong connection between flavour and sound that has only just begun to be explored by artists working in these sensory realms. This paper investigates my Oenosthesia art project, a work for wine and sound that aims to harness crossmodal correspondences in the combination of a soundscape created from field recordings of the winemaking process with wines consumed as part of the piece. Its success in achieving this was tested through data gathered from participants at presentations of the work in London (September 2016) and in Sydney (March 2017) as part of my multidisciplinary doctoral research into the interaction between sound and flavour. This paper discusses the results of this study, which suggests that sound can significantly change perceptions of flavour and highlights the potential for the design of crossmodally congruent sound works to enhance the specific flavour profiles of a wine.