Assessing Oenosthesia: Blending wine and sound

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 strong connections between flavour and sound that have only just begun to be explored by artists working in these sensory realms. This article investigates Oenosthesia, a practice-led art research project that aimed to harness crossmodal correspondences in an artwork that combines 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 in September 2016 and in Sydney in March 2017. This article presents the results of this study, which suggest that sound can significantly change perceptions of flavour in an experimental audio-gustatory artwork and highlights the potential for the design of crossmodally congruent sound works that heighten specific flavour characters of a wine.