Research process and methodology
The character of this research is not only interdisciplinary in that it seeks to present ways of combining the two domains of food and music in a coherent and holistic way, but also in how its methodology was conceived. The bibliographic part of the research has relied heavily on articles and reviews published in the field of experimental psychology (for more information on this go to the chapter on Current state of knowledge), but also on different publications related to the notion of ritual (see Aldridge, 2007; Brumberg-Kraus, 2020; Sennett, 2013), and a number of cookbooks and books about food (see Evans et al., 2017; McFadden, 2017; Pollan, 2011; Redzepi & Zilber, 2018; Robertson, 2013a, 2013b; Shih et al., 2020; Shockey & Shockey, 2019; Slater, 2009, amongst others).
There has also been an important experimental component to this research, as I designed two performances that were presented in a sort of laboratory setting, and one public performance, all of which contributed to the contents of this research in an essential way. This contribution was partly through the analysis of the process of designing the experimental performances themselves, including the composition and performance of the music and the creation of the recipes for and cooking of the food, and partly through the collection of (qualitative) feedback from the audience who attended these performances. My own work and my experience of it both during and after its creation have therefore been considered as two of the main subjects of this study.
Designing the experiments
One of the challenges in designing the experiments for this research, which would at the same time function as prototypes for real-life performances, was to find a format for them that would balance an element of familiarity with the novelty of the experience. Novelty and familiarity need to be balanced in order to achieve an adequate arousal level in the guest, since too much familiarity would result in a lack of stimuli and an apathetic level of engagement with the performance, while a completely novel experience would result in a hyper-aroused state that would virtually eliminate the ability of the guest to engage with their environment (Aldridge, 2007, pp. 5-6). As Michael Bom Frøst states in relation to the novelty vs. familiarity of food, what is interesting is that “experienced novelty and familiarity are not necessarily inversely correlated; rather, they can be completely uncorrelated - a food can be experienced by the eater as both highly familiar and highly novel. A food that strikes a sound chord of recognition, yet still gives the eater the excitement of trying something new, is a sure success” (2017, p. 46). This was what I tried to achieve during the experiments, an experience that would be perceived by the guests as very familiar and highly novel at the same time.
When exploring examples of food and music pairings that had been done in the recent past, I discovered that most of them relied on the music not being performed live, and basically had the form of a restaurant dinner in which every guest either had a small speaker in front of them, or was listening to the music through a set of headphones (this fits very well into the definition of 'sonic seasoning', a term further explained in the chapter Current state of knowledge). This, which according to Ben Gouge, the creator of the so-called 'food opera', is essential “in order not to impinge on the dining experience” (Houge, 2012), went directly against my desire of creating a live performance experience in which food and music would be paired. I therefore decided that the element of familiarity would not be that of a restaurant dinner, but that the basic format for the experiments would be that of a concert, in which the audience would be facing the musicians, and not each other around a dinner table. Each guest would be handed a plate containing several dishes at the beginning of the performance, they would hold the plate in their hands while sitting and listening, and they would eat the different dishes when indicated to do so.
After each of the two experiments, the participants were asked to fill out a feedback form. Once everyone had finished, there was a discussion in which the participants shared their impressions of the experiment and asked questions. Lastly, I shared some insighs into how the experiment had been designed and the underlying philosophy of the research.
Those who participated in the experiments will be referred to indistinctly as either 'participants', 'audience', 'guests', or simply 'attendants'. The word 'diners' has been purposefully avoided due to the basic concert-like format of the experiments.
After carrying out the two experiments, I had the opportunity of trying out all the conclusions I had come to in a public performance, which will from now on be referred to by its name, Four Bites of Autumn. The conditions of each of the two experiments and Four Bites of Autumn are described below.
The completed audience feedback forms can be found in Appendix 3.
Experiment 1
For the first experiment, I decided that all the music would be composed by myself, and that I would also take charge of designing and cooking the food. The experiment was carried out on the 2nd of April 2022 at 16:00, in Studio 4 at the Royal Conservatoire The Hague. There were 19 participants who gave their informed consent prior to taking part in the experiment. The performers were Julia Hernández Sánchez on the baroque violin and myself on the traverso. The participants were seated in two concentric semicircles around the performers. The main focus point in the design of the pairing between the food and the music were crossmodal correspondences between basic taste and different musical parameters (for more information on this, go to the section Mediating elements. Crossmodal correspondences).
Experiment 2
Again, all the music and food were conceived by myself. The experiment was carried out on the 24th of September 2022 at 16:00, again in Studio 4 at the Royal Conservatoire The Hague. There were 20 participants who gave their informed consent prior to taking part in the experiment. The performers were, again, Julia Hernández Sánchez on the baroque violin, and myself on the traverso. The audience was this time seated in a circle around the two musicians, who played back to back. The main focus point in the design of the pairing between the food and the music was the semantic matching between the two elements, based on texture (for more information on this, go to the section Mediating elements. Semantic matching).
Four Bites of Autumn
For the public performance Four Bites of Autumn, which took place six times over the course of the evenings of the 3rd, 4th, and 5th of November 2022, at the café Bij de Roos, situated in the old miller's house belonging to the windmill De Roos in Delft, I decided, due to the length of the performance, which was to be of around one hour and a quarter, to include repertoire from the 18th century, apart from preludes for these pieces, which I composed myself. As this performance was a co-creation between Bij de Roos and my ensemble Celeritas, the menu was conceived by both myself and Gaston Badoux, the owner of the café, and prepared by the café's staff. The main focus points in the design of the pairing were, apart from ideas gathered from the two experiments, semantic matching based on affect (for more information on this, go to the section Mediating elements. Semantic matching), and narrative (for more information on this, go to the section Mediating elements. Narrative).
