The Multisensory Experience: How Scent, Sound & Texture Shape Luxury - with Professor Charles Spence

0:05Welcome to Luxury Icons. Now today we're recording live from the absolutely stunning Six Senses Hotel that just launched in London. We thought the senses were something we were focused on, so it was a very apt place to have this conversation. Let's get into it. our guest today has spent 30 years asking a question that every person in this room has got well a commercial interest in um why do things feel luxurious and more importantly what actually produces that feeling professor charles sprentz is professor of experimental psychology at university of oxford um in 1997 he found out this incredible department called the cross-model research lab and focus on how senses combine to shape perception, preference and pleasure.

0:53He's covered over a thousand academic papers. He's the author of Gastrophysics, a defining text in how we think about science of eating. He's also written Sense Hacking, a book called Perfect Meal, Multicensory Packaging and most recently Physical Dining. Now, if you've ever eaten at the Fat Duck, drunk, crude or walked into a sensory, so I'm going to say that wrong, Sensatory Hotel. We've actually already been inside of Charles' work, but it goes so much more beyond that because he's consulted for BNW, Toyota, Unilever, Starbucks, Nestle, and so many more. His central insight is that, well, whilst the luxury industry has always known that the senses matter, it is actually possible to design them with precision, which is great.

1:38So a very warm welcome to Professor Charles Swartz. My first question to you, every brand in this room obviously believes they are already multisensory. You know, the craftsmanship, the unboxing, the store, the scent in the lobby and whatever the way that is. But after 30 years of studying this, where do luxury houses generally get it from? Well, lots of ways, I suppose. Could be many people might just talk the talk and say we are the senses. like Kit Kat probably 20 years ago came out with their senses Kit Kat bar oh really? that's just a word there's nothing behind it and clearly the product is multi-sensory but there's no special design going along with that naming sometimes you know people claim it because it seems sexy and current but don't deliver behind that I guess another part is so often it's it feels like it's just done for the sake of marketing so lots of multi-sensory interventions sensorians um sensplorations uh many brands will do it but then come back a month later and it's gone can't access it so once they've got the press headlines things on to the next thing it feels like it's sort of frustrating for me after three decades the most of the things that we've been involved in uh yeah no longer exist and maybe that speaks to a lack of commitment or belief but it really makes a difference in lots of cases um it's just a marketing thing no more and then maybe a third thing is that i guess none of us believe that we're affected by the senses as much as we actually are and that's what most of my job is is sort of measuring the impact of the softness of the chair you're sitting on the color of the paint of the wall the music in the background the center of the lobby on people's perception memory choice uh and so on but none of us feel that that makes any difference we all feel we can just take taste the pastry on the plate and that we wouldn't be influenced by anything else.

3:38Our research shows that we are influenced by all these other factors. It doesn't feel that way. It's very tempting to say, well, beyond the marketing benefit of appealing to the senses, why bother? We can cancel it because people say it doesn't matter. It doesn't feel to me like it matters to my choice or to my customer's choice. Therefore, it's sort of dispensable. Interesting. and actually um i feel like smell is one of those ones that sort of we sort of probably well we probably definitely underutilize it in luxury but also it's it probably doesn't get that much credit you know a sense a sense smell can actually really sort of transport a space which is that is that fair to say uh absolutely uh you can have both sort of nostalgic uh properties take you somewhere to your childhood uh proustian moments the madeleine would be one thing um ignore so i I guess in this sort of context, it would be something that can deliver on well-being as well.

4:31But at the same time, it's something that's hard to articulate. It's hard to share online. Much easier to share what you look like, maybe what you sound like, what you smell like as a brand. How are you going to do that other than sending out the actual scent to customers? And so for those reasons, I think it's been sort of neglected. as well as the fact that it's very hard, I guess, to control scent in a space strategically. Sometimes we go with, from the brands we work with, just down Regent Street, and you can find most of the stores there are actually now using scent somehow, some through the air conditioning, some maybe just a bunch of flowers, others it may be a coffee shop in a bookstore, sort of giving you the olfactory, but it's kind of hard to control it, to get it right.

5:16And anybody who's working in those spaces will probably become anosmic. They'll no longer be able to smell it. So we worked with one of the Samsung Experience stores years ago, and they would have scent encapsulation, so it's a more intelligent delivery of scent in stores to match the colour scheme and the sounds and the touch tables. Sprinkle some encapsulated scent on the floor, then when people walk over it in the morning, they break the capsules and you get the scent at the point you need them rather than 24-7. But those who work in the stores, after a few days, they can't smell the green melon anymore it's not there it's not working you can't smell it but maybe your customers can when they come in for the first time yeah and that sort of inability to actually smell also um makes it challenging yeah why are we paying for something that you know i can't smell yeah but my client says i'm having any impact yeah but clearly very often can be it must be also really hard to sort of define smell because first of all it's really subjective but also you know it's not like when you when you've got a brand identity sort of bible or brand bible whatever you're calling it you know you have your pantones and you can define exactly what color it is but how would you ever go to describe a smell and we don't have first of all potentially the language but also certainly with brand people we don't have yeah we don't have yeah any sort of dna of a smell that we could sort of make up um and i'm not sorry a perfumier but work with various ones, big names and big flavor houses and fragrance houses.

6:49And there, I guess there are, I see, in some of the workshops that these scent designers will deliver, you might do something sort of semantic differential technique. So define what your brand stands for and sort of semantic attributes. Is it power or cleanly or natural or strong? And then try and find that in scent space. and there are sort of techniques for almost translating your brand DNA into the old factory domain. And then separately, I think, to think both about, I see the best uses of scent being something that's kind of both sort of a signature scent, distinctively you, but also functional in the sense that it delivers some benefit.

7:28And that might be for some hotel chain, maybe if it's close to the airport, then you have lots of stressed passengers on long-haul flights arriving. how can you in the lobby sort of help to relax them with a signature scent or maybe it's you know you convey um i like sort of the hilton double tree examples of the cookie scent that sort of sweet smell uh when you enter sort of distinctively then rather than any other chain um and that sweet smell is sort of liked um conveys you know sort of gift that you're getting yeah um and so delivers a functional benefit as well i liked your anecdote in your book about the new car smell?

8:02I think new car smell, we weren't born liking it, presumably. It's just some volatile chemicals coming off the leather and the woodwork, but it's something we've grown to like and has great value to people, probably because it's associated with a high value purchase. So important that these days, as they change materials in the automotive industry, you can lose the natural new car smell. And cars these days, after they've been out in the sun for a while will smell a sort of volatile organic compound VOCs, kind of fishy smell instead, not at all what you want for a new car smell. So they have noses who will deliberately try and recreate the smell of the new car, which you can then buy in bottles.

8:43I think if it works for a new car smell, many other of those high value purchases we have couldn't be associated with the equivalent of a new car smell. Your new computer, your new iPhone smell, there seems to be an opportunity there. and one of my favourite examples was from somewhere in the Midlands where they kind of tidy up your Rolls Royce and you send it off and they polish it and then check the steering and such like but then they also spray in the smell of a 1945 silver shadow, leather and wood smell and you have these sort of quarter of a million pound items and the owners when they get the car back say, you know, what have you done?

9:19It's like new and they can't really understand what's changed but it sort of revitalised it purely through the smell purely through a smell that's learnt by association with a high-value thing. But that sort of new car smell so far seems to be restricted to automotive and doesn't extend anywhere else. Yeah, I feel like that's an amazing opportunity. I also was really interested in your work with Sanitore, who were doing smell, you know, instead of sort of, as you gave the example of when people walk into a space, they actually do it on departure. What's the rationale for that? So the Sanitore group, we've been working on sort of multi-sensory design, and that could be everything from the sort of food you find in the room when you arrive to, of course, the pillow menus.

10:01But then thinking about scent and there really for many experiences, most of my experiences are with restaurants, but say on your summer holidays at a sensatory resort, that's really kind of a short part of the year. And some of your pleasure is there in the meal or in the holiday, but a lot of your pleasure probably resides in the anticipation before you arrive and then in your recollection after you come back what a great time you had and so much of multi-sensory and other design it seems to be all about just making things great in the moment in the hope that they'll be remembered as a great thing but in fact you know i'm a sort of psychologist by training and we know that um your memory plays tricks on all of us and what we remember is not just like a weaker version of what actually happens but there are systematic um biases we'll all remember the first part of an experience we'll all remember more the last part the high point of an experience but the middle of it probably not at all so if you're a chef you know there that explains the introduction of tasting menus we have lots of small bites and you have lots of potential moments hooks for stiction for memory of the experience that's a much more sensible way to do things than a three course meal where you've got mouthful after mouthful of the main course that's all exactly the same and will be lost to memory as soon as they walk out of the door.

11:19So how do you create these sort of sticky memories and how do you use the senses beyond the experience itself and anticipation thereafter? And with Sensitory, I worked with Dawn Goldsworthy, who's a synesthetic artist, scent artist in the States. We went out to one of the resorts and then tried to, or she composed the scent of the place, which is then sprayed in the lobby when you enter, when you've got some decompressing multisensory pods. where you can sit on there floating in the air with the smell of the sea or the sky or the forest, with colours, sounds, scents. And then when you leave the resort, you'll get a little bottle of fragrance to take with you to go home.

12:02And the idea, maybe you scent your home with that fragrance, and that will trigger that kind of Proustian moment and your nostalgia for all the great experiences that you had. So you can use that scent both in the moment and then to have a long trail to the experience. others who use it i see in the fat duck restaurant do something very similar and years ago before contemporary booking habits you'd book a table at the fat duck restaurant and a couple weeks before you went you get a little notification card don't forget you're coming to eston's expecting you next tuesday and you sort of think well why did you think i was going to forget this once in a lifetime meal of course that's not really the point the point was that that card was scented with a scent.

12:42You're starting to experience anticipation. Then when you turn up to the restaurant, the door frames, if the waiters have been in the job right, the door frames have been rubbed with that scent. You walk in and it's a familiar scent now. Not quite sure what it is yet, but it sort of references the initial part. And then when you leave the restaurant, you go home with a little bag of sweeties from maybe the sweet shop and it's a scent of a sweet shop. So it's kind of a nostalgic scent. The idea being this would be a scent that's pleasurable to all of us. The sweet shop of your child to the bottles and stuff and no one knows quite what it's like you can sort of imagine a sweet scent um and think it's a great way to use scent then to extend the experience before and after so whether it's restaurants or um uh hotels i love that and probably very difficult to figure out from a consumer's perspective what quite it is that's sort of making you feel at home or recognized or whatever but sneaky actually um in a recent interview you talked about um the brain misattributing pleasure so perhaps you think it's one thing that you're particularly enjoying and actually something else is doing heavy lifting um yeah can you tell us a little bit more about this so yes we're all kind of visual creatures visually dominant more of our brains given over to what we see than to any other sense our sense of smell says probably only about two or three percent of our brain neocortex uh given over uh which is why we find it so hard to talk about scent because we have enough brain to do it.

14:06And what that means in an everyday situation is we're likely to attribute our pleasures to that biggest sense vision, not to the other senses that might be doing the work. And so I know that if I add, for example, a fragrance to World Cup games coming, maybe I can have a scent stick that will pump out the smell of freshly cut mown grass when you watch a World Cup football. I can demonstrate in the lab or wherever else that that scent enhances the immersion and the experience, your enjoyment, perhaps the memorability of the game of football but when I ask you why did you think that was such a great game most people will say it was just great football the way they passed or the screen's got a high resolution it was really big, no one will attribute their pleasure to smell and that's really sort of problematic in the sense if your car company say with Peugeot came out for a while with a scent display so maybe you can have a sense in your car that would be congruent with the countryside that you were travelling through at the time but after you've used the first one who's going to go out and buy the refill if you think it's just a great car you don't attribute the pleasure to the right place and that's probably why scented cinema too again doesn't really sort of stick into the long term i know it works potentially but until you can somehow demonstrate to the consumer the value of these sort of neglected senses uh you have to deliver it to them give it to them you can't expect them to search it out Moving on to the sort of multisensory congruency and what you term cross-model counterpoint.

15:34Well, first of all, I mean, I thought I was going to say it all right. Tell us what they mean. So cross-model congruency is the name when you start thinking about multisensory design, deliberately incorporating more senses into an experience than how do they align or do they? I very often work with clients who say, yes, I've heard all about sensory marketing. I've incorporated my signature scent, distinctive feel and taste and so on. But they haven't really thought about how each sense matches or doesn't match each other. And so that can lead to kind of conflict in the consumer, say, if they enter a space, say a shopping center, where you have upbeat, high-tempo music, sort of arousing, alerting you, but you've got a relaxing scent instead.

16:21am I supposed to be relaxed or alerted or roused or that's kind of incongruent so the challenge is how to make sure that the senses are in alignment telling the same message and then sometimes the challenges of that that maybe you might think that an alerting color is maybe bright sunshine yellow and a calming color will be pastel purple or blue say for a for a bedroom and then an alerting scent well maybe that's peppermint but then peppermint doesn't really go with yellow So each sense individually is alerting, but they're not congruent with each other. So how will that be sort of resolved for the consumer?

16:58It's kind of an ongoing challenge. And maybe somewhere here, I'm sort of a very interested biophilic design at the minute, as many are, which you can't help but notice, coming in the lobby here and looking around everywhere. Just for our podcast listeners, we're at the new six senses in London, and the lobby is absolutely overflowing with plants and flowers. So for those who are going down that route of biophilic design, as many are, then the question of what does congruency mean here could mean lots of things. Should the scent we get match the plants that we see or not? Because maybe we like floral scents, but what we're seeing is greenery here, shrubs.

17:39One kind of congruency. or could it be instead that you think about congruency of place or time in all these most indoor plants here across the UK or sort of tropical plants really. They're sort of entirely incongruent with the place, with the time of year. Does that matter or not? Are we happy to accept, overlook that, as long as the other elements are kind of congruent? So that's something to try and design for, I think, and a concern to watch out for when you start adding senses, will they speak the same language, will one support the other, or will they conflict and leave your consumers kind of not sure quite what the message is and how to interpret it.

18:23And that sort of conflict will then be probably hard to process for your consumers. If it's hard to process, then less likely generally. But the other thing you said was a counterpoint, which I'm really interested in because what I've seen over the last three decades is most of the time when people start about extra senses, the idea is let's complement, let's be congruent. Let's do exactly the same thing in smell that you can see or that you can hear. So if you can see nature, we should hear nature, we should smell nature, it'll all be congruent. But looking at the world of entertainment, then it gives some very interesting ideas, I think, for the future of multisensory design, because there are people like Sally Baines, who writes a lot about scent in live performance in the theatre and opera and so on.

19:06and she says why on earth would you add scent to theater or opera just to show what's going on on stage yes it's congruent but it's pleonastic which is kind of redundant pointless if i can see it i don't need to smell it as well it's not giving me any extra information overloading me with more stuff that i could do without so she thinks can a congruency sort of boring or can be at least in that context of entertainment um and it's just instead maybe you add extra senses to do something different for counterpoint for example to tell a different story to tell a joke uh to conflict um this sort of notion of counterpoint comes from initially from music but is used a lot in film and there that's kind of multi-sensory design how do i decide what music goes along with the what's going on on screen um and you see everything from stanley kubrick to quentin tarantino who will deliberately use music that doesn't match you have ultra violence on screen and you have you know singing in the rain playing in the background entirely incongruent but that's kind of the point yeah to offset uh one sense by another and then maybe in some cases it's uh another of these big words i had to look up and they're pathetic when you have some real ultra violence on screen um say a clockwork orange and the happy music starts before the violence starts and then happy music continues after it's finished the violence it's on to the next scene it's almost as if the music doesn't care about what's happening in the world another kind of interesting use and so far there's a whole literature of some media studies on use of counterpoint and other non-pleonastic non-redundant uses of extrasense i think well how could that be used outside of cinema surely it could but as yet i haven't seen any examples so i work a lot in restaurants i think well you know could you have a culinary counterpoint what would that even mean um as yet i haven't seen anyone doing it that i know about but seems like an interesting space moving forward i guess it's a question of whether you want sort of the experience to flow or actually some bring someone to attention or make them feel slightly uncomfortable or sort of yeah i guess unnerve them in a way that feels to me like that would be the result um yeah but it's also really interesting because you say you know mint doesn't go with yellow walls well why not like is that all learned from sort of our experiences of the world that we're just used to sort of associating different things and different things at different times i think so um pretty safe is to say that so i think all of us kind of connect our senses in surprising ways almost synesthetic synesthetics to people who see colored numbers and days of the week and stuff like that uh and sort of the notion of multi-sensory design a synesthetic design let's see what synesthete what colors they see when they hear the music what shapes they smell they they feel when they smell the perfume let's use that in our design has had a long history for a century or so.

21:55I think sort of fundamentally wrong because we're not most of us synesthetes and synesthetes have idiosyncratic connections between their senses, meaning that they're not shared from one synesthete to the next. So one synesthete might think Monday is red, the next synesthete thinks it's blue. So what should I do in terms of designing? Makes no sense. And yet we're all almost synesthetes. We all connect shapes and colours, tastes, textures, sounds together in some interesting ways. and that sort of colour-taste connection, say, or colour-smell connection, what colour is peppermint, I think it's probably all learnt from experience in the environment.

22:30And our brain just picks up the sticks of the world. That, for example, with Chef Joseph Yousef in Kitchen Theory in London here, I had a dish that's called the foretaste, the mousse-bouche. And it comes as four spherified balls of colour. So you can't smell anything, it's just spherified. And they're caught down randomly in front of the dinner guests. And the waiter or waitress says, this is the four tastes. We recommend you rearrange your four spoons. One's black, one's white, one's green, and one's a pinkish red. Rearrange your spoons with a sweet and then salty, then bitter, and then sour.

23:07And what we find is that most people will associate pink with sweet, green and yellow with sour, browny, black, and purple with bitter, white and blue with salty. So these are the kind of associations that most of us share. Picked up from experience, I mean, why salt should be white and sugar not. Yeah. Who knows? And the blue of, is that blue of the sea, or is it the blue of those old crisp packets where you get the salt cachet from decades ago? That's where my brain went straight away. That's exactly it, yeah. Or even my favourite one is sort of in crisp packets, because most times, again, you have to use colour in packaging to congruently denote the category or flavour, and crisps are a great example of that.

23:51And yet Walker sort of plays against that with a cheese and onion and salt and vinegar, which they, I forget, which most people love. Cheese and onion is blue. And salt and vinegar is green. And they do the opposite. Supposedly they introduced it so that people were just going to the supermarket, grab the color they like, and end up tasting a new flavor at the time. And so that's a playful brand that can get away with this incongruency in a way that other brands perhaps can't. But there to see, could I tell kind of your A by whether you're old enough to remember what the colour scheme used to be.

24:23And can I tell you a brand preference just by whether you think salt and vinegar is blue or green or not. But when my father-in-law used to come to England from Colombia, they have different associations, it turns out. And he'd always go to the pub in Oxford, and he couldn't speak a word of English. So he'd sort of point behind the counter for some crisps. He'd like the green ones, the green packet. But in Colombia, it's very confusing. lemons are green. Right. They're not limes, green lemons. So if you go shopping for clothing, it'll be lemons, this season's colour, and it's green. And so he comes to Oxford thinking that the green packet means lemon-flavoured crisps.

25:04And he's very confused when he gets salt and vinegar or cheese and onion, depending which brand they have. So there are kind of cultural variations sometimes in this. Probably there are a few things that maybe are hardwired in us as well, maybe. I think we're all born liking sweetness. We're all born disliking bitterness because it can be poisonous. But most everything else is learnt. I think we're all born, if you're trying to alert somebody, then the colour of dawn, so 540 nanometres blue light, is very effective. Some of the airlines and airports use it. I think Heathrow sometimes has it. When you arrive after a long-haul flight, that colour of dawn is different in hue than the colour of the afternoon, where you take photographs in the afternoon when it's warmer sky.

25:43But that colour will awake you up. and they use that colour scheme deliberately to help people after long-haul flights. And that, I think, is not learnt. That's pretty hardwired because the blue of dawn is the same the world over and always has been. And our brains have internalised that somehow. And there may be the pink of Baker Miller Pink, famous colour of chewing gum, and that supposedly calms people down. So lots of North American sports teams will paint their opponents' changing rooms Baker Miller Pink for sort of psychological warfare so they won't be able to compete as well. I think one of the Kardashians paints her kitchen, Baker Miller pink, suppresses her appetite.

26:22I'm not sure about that one. And that may be hardwired too. That particular sort of pink is sort of a skin tone pink. And it turns out you can tell the emotional state of somebody else from the blood flow in their face. So more of our brain is given over to those pink hues because of the importance of social communication. And that one is probably hardwired too. But apart from those two, the blue of dawn and the pink of skin tones, I think the rest is all learnt. What about green rooms? Are they green for a reason? So you might think of nature effect. Yeah. We haven't talked about the blues and greens of nature.

26:56Does it have to be real nature or is just the colour sufficient? Although it would be interesting that when you ask people, what are their favourite colours across the world and across time, blue and green are the most popular choices. but as soon as you switch it into world of food different context blue and green are people's least favorite colors so kind of response to color then is sort of dependent on the context that we're in thinking about your work with a wider lens so when you're sort of receiving these briefs that you know to add in these additional layers for example what's generally the objective is it all about pleasure and abominent is about price to justification is about emotional storytelling so what's the general brief or is it perhaps a combination in some cases it's we've introduced extra senses, we've changed some aspect of our design, and what the consumers are saying just doesn't make any sense to us.

27:48So we've, I don't know, we've changed the colour of, in the old days, we were working with Lynx, deodorant, and Dove. We changed the colour of the cam, stand out on the shelf, and then consumers say the product smelled different. It's exactly the same. It makes no sense. So what's going on here? How do we understand the consumer? When Coca-Cola came out with a white polar bear Christmas cam a couple of years ago, again, people say, hey, it's different. They don't like it, so much so that they had to withdraw it and then give it to airline passengers who couldn't complain about what they were being served.

28:19It makes no sense unless you think that we are visually dominant and our brain, if you can't see the drink, it sees the color of the packaging and that sets the expectations thereafter. So quite often it's that. We've done something. It should have worked, but it hasn't. Why not? And then other times, just thinking about what is the possibility to engage more senses and how to do it. As we measure the impact scientifically or look for some sort of justification for doing so. So I'm not a perfumer. I'm not a chef or a color coordinator or color trend. But we work with all the sort of creatives and then try to connect the senses.

29:03Perhaps, you know, making music to match a perfume instead of a project in Brazil. and they've got sort of poor perfumes, their flavourists and fragrance experts are in charge of the fragrances. We're trying to figure out how would you translate those scents into sounds so that you can communicate them online and then pass our insights to a sound designer or composer who will then sort of take that and create something. So in that sort of, maybe in the innovation phase and then sometimes in the measurement thereafter, after, okay, we have introduced this thing. Does it really make it taste better, more memorable?

29:40Are people willing to pay more for it? And where are possible, try and do experiments in the real world in restaurants or in hotels as well, looking at the impact, say, of beautiful plating. Are people really willing to pay more for latte art, working in sort of coffee shops, and they're having real consumers paying real money for the experience and then measuring the impact of artistic, creative, multisensory or unisensory designs that may have been inspired by what we know about the sciences and the connection between them, the almost anesthetic connections. Staying on sort of the connection between taste and sound.

30:23So we're reading about this really amazing experiment with crude. We're going to do a little experiment today. We can't use crude, very sadly, actually. You should get some next time. But it also went for chocolate. Hooray! You're going to get two types of chocolate, everybody. So people have all these almost synesthetic connections between their senses, colours and taste. Well, maybe that makes sense. Fruits go from green and sour and not very nutritious to redder and warmer and sweeter. And that's a statistic of the world our brain picks up. Making things redder makes them taste sweeter. But our brain also picks up connections between sounds and taste as well.

31:01perhaps most famous for working with the fat duck on the sound of the sea dish 20 years ago showing that seafood tastes significantly better when you play the sounds of the sea than if you play farmyard chickens or something else that was taken by the restaurant to deliver the first digital technology at the dining table the sound of the sea dish that comes looking like the seashore in the fat duck restaurant with sand and foam seamus and sashimi but the waiter also brings a conch shell with some earbud to put the earbuds in and you hear the waves first example of technology at table, very much multi-sensory design going off the plate, great tasting food to begin with, but then if you're delivering such an expensive luxury experience, it has to be total design, both on and off the plate, and also extraordinary in a way that many journalists and people who've been to the restaurant in print or just in person will tell you, I cried.

31:49Wow. It wasn't the intention, but it's the result. And that's extraordinary because none of us would ever cry, problems the last time you cried over seafood. You know what that is? There's something about this dish connecting the senses in this way. Maybe it's that sound of the sea. Nostalgia. Nostalgia of your childhood, happy holidays. But that's going to be an extraordinary response for engaging the senses, and that's the kind of thing that we're doing more of. And that was great when we first came on the menu in 2007. It became the signature dish, and it's still there to this day 20 years later.

32:18But after a few years, people said, well, that's obvious, isn't it? Of course, seaside sound makes, we all know fish and chips taste better by the sea. It's kind of obvious. We didn't need a psychologist to tell us that. It wasn't obvious at the time, but in hindsight, it looks so. So the next stage of the evolution, initially with the fat duck, but since elsewhere, is to have music seasoning food. Because music and taste, they're not obviously connected in the way that seafood and seaside sounds might be. So back in 2012, we did the first sonic seasoning at a restaurant in Islington, the House of Wolves.

32:52Gave people a sonic cake pop, a chocolate lolly. and got them to use their technology to dial one of two telephone numbers, 0845 680 2419. If you want to make your chocolate more bitter, dial a different number on your technology to sonically season your food because we all live in different taste worlds to bring out sweetness. We don't have the lolly, but we have some chocolate in front of you. So if you'd like to take a piece of chocolate, taste it, and just think about how bitter or sweet it tastes. The black one first, the dark chocolate? Yes. One piece of music. Or bitter music or more sweet.